April 3, 2023 12:00 pm
Natural light greatly impacts how a building is experienced by its occupants. It affects their well-being, notably from their health and biological clock perspectives, but also their perceived visual and thermal comfort, or their emotional response. If we want to support the design of places of delightful – and daylightful – living, we must bring these multifaceted considerations to become integral drivers of the creative process.
This lecture explored current research efforts aiming towards a deeper integration of daylighting performance and indoor comfort in design, by reaching out to various fields of science, from chronobiology and neuroscience to psychophysics and computer graphics. It provided examples of how human-centered daylighting design can be supported by research outcomes to build a well-informed, evidence-based dialogue between specialists and practitioners, and how to raise awareness of the general public to these questions.
Speaker bio:
Marilyne Andersen is Full Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and Head of the Laboratory of Integrated Performance in Design (LIPID). Her research focuses on the impact of daylight on building occupants around questions of comfort, perception and health within an architectural design context.
With a background in physics, she was a tenure-track professor at MIT from 2004 to 2010, was Dean of the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering at EPFL from 2013 to 2018, is Academic Director of the Smart Living Lab and co-founder of the consulting startup OCULIGHT dynamics, offering specialized consulting services on the psycho-physiological effects of light in design. She was also a Visiting Professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design in 2019.
Author of over 200 refereed scientific papers with several distinctions, she was the inaugural laureate of the global Daylight Research Award in 2016 and led the winning team for the US Solar Decathlon 2017 competition. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Building & Environment, LEUKOS and Buildings & Cities journals and Board member of the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction, of the ArtTech Foundation and of the EPFL+ECAL Lab.