ABSTRACT

With the help of advanced technologies, many efforts have been made to integrate design, science, and engineering in architectural research and practices. Such an intellectual development trend helps us implement more complicated design ideas in various building typologies. This phenomenon naturally demands more expert knowledge of multiple disciplines and also requires individual scholars and professionals to understand each other’s domain knowledge. This chapter discusses multidisciplinary projects as a future direction in which we may need to go. One project shows how to integrate a building occupant’s physiological signals into a building system loop to maximize his/her environmental comfort and to enhance energy efficiency in operating the building. In this study, skin temperature, heart rate, and human factors, such as gender and body mass index, have been adopted to estimate the occupant’s thermal sensation and comfort levels to optimize the thermal quality. Based on a similar principle, an occupant’s pupil size has been adopted as a means for identifying the user’s visual comfort in an office workstation setting. As such, this section introduces the potential of a multidisciplinary approach that will advance the current architectural area and enhance human and environmental benefits.