Towards predicting the (dis)comfort performance by modelling: methods and findings

Towards predicting the (dis)comfort performance by modelling: methods and findings

Naddeo, A. (TU Delft Applied Ergonomics and Design)

Vink, P. (promotor)

Delft University of Technology

2017-12-14

The research work underlying this thesis starts from a societal issue: A comfortable artefact helps people to improve their well-being and can be sold easier.
In order to fulfil these two requirements (wellbeing and companies’ profit) a comfort-driven human-centred design method is needed.
Driven by the thoughts of Stephen Hawking that, talking about the unified theory of Physics, in 1998 said “it may not aid the survival of our species; it may not even affect our life-style. But ever since the down of civilisation, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying “MAIN ORDER” in the world”, the purpose of this PhD thesis is the investigation and the look of a model useful to describe, analyse, evaluate and predict (dis)comfort perceptions.
The contribution of this PhD work to solve this issue can be resumed by the following statement:
“Starting from the proposal for a general framework for describing comfort perception and a general law for predicting it, some studies about specific comfort performances have been conducted in order to define some comfort “functions” and to propose a design-path that should help designers and companies to improve the comfort performance of new products”.

https://doi.org/10.4233/uuid:ac8ebee1-278c-484d-acc0-d39c765c1ac2

978-94-6186-870-1

Institutional Repository

doctoral thesis

© 2017 A. Naddeo