Acceptability

Occupants in non-industrial indoor environments should decide whether the indoor air quality is acceptable or not. This paper describes the method by which the assessments of acceptability of air quality can be used for measuring short-term sensory effects on humans caused by indoor exposures. It also describes how this method can be applied to estimate the perceived indoor air quality used as a design criteria for the ventilation of buildings.

This study aims to assess the thermal conditions of an indoor environment deemed unacceptable by workers. For this purpose, Ostracon, a voting device, was developed to record the physical environment at the time a worker presses a button to express a complaint. Ostracon was used to record the opinions of 90 workers about their thermal environment in six offices during the summer. The results show that workers found the indoor thermal environment unacceptable even when the static thermal conditions were within a range that was predicted to be comfortable.

Designing for natural ventilation became permissible across an extended range of climate zones in 2004 with the incorporation of an adaptive model into ASHRAE's comfort standard (ASHRAE, 2004). This mainstreaming of adaptive comfort was further reinforced with the introduction in 2007 of a European standard (EN, 2007) that mirrored ASHRAE's precedent. Despite broad international acceptance and application of the concept, there remains a gap in the fundamental theoretical underpinnings of the adaptive comfort approach.

“Tatami” is a traditional Japanese building material used as a floor mat made with rush. It used to be said that the smell of tatami is preferred by many Japanese, because almost all Japanese houses have had tatami rooms since early times. In this paper,

There are a lot of aspects for evaluation of odor. Not only the hedonics aspects but also thepleasantness aspects are very important for the building design. Authors have investigated the sensoryevaluation of odor from building materials and turned our attentions to the psychological process ofodor evaluation. In this paper, odors emitted from four building materials that is wood, wood flooring,Tatami (Japanese traditional rush mat) and concrete were adopted and the sensory evaluation tests byhuman subjects were conducted.