Future Comforts:
re-conditioning urban environments

Workshop at the Policy Studies Institute, London

29-30 January 2004

The workshop on 'Future Comforts' was designed to take stock of the challenges involved in constructing sustainable indoor environments and in renegotiating meanings and expectations of comfort in the context of climate change. One of the key issues addressed was how it might be possible to avoid situations in which responses to global warming involve ever-greater reliance on energy intensive air-conditioning systems. Workshop participants included building and social scientists, design professionals, property developers, government regulators and air conditioning manufacturers.

Click on the following links for details of:

• Workshop programme and participants
• Workshop discussion paper
• Workshop summary report
• Abstracts

Copies of workshop presentations:

• Comfort paradigms and practices (Heather Chappells and Elizabeth Shove)
• Comfort and the outdoor environment (Koen Steemers)
• Air-conditioning in the US (Marsha Ackermann)
• Constructing indoor environments in the UK (Tadj Oreszczyn)
• Do you want to control the temperature (Max Fordham)
• Recording summer temperatures (Bill Gething)
• Comfort: what the users think (Adrian Leaman)
• Air-conditioning futures (Andrew Keogh)
• Precision and thermal comfort (Fergus Nicol)

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