Assessment of Outdoor Comfort Conditions Based on the Application of a Participative Model in Open Urban Spaces

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a mobile device application for the implementation of a participative model for evaluation of open spaces. Participants would be users of the Cidade Universitaria Armando Salles Oliveira (CUASO) Campus. The objective is to verify their perception of open spaces with regards to thermal environmental conditions; acoustics; daylight and ergonomic, and enable quick acquisition of these opinions. Thus, the name of the application: Opine. The participative model will provide quantitative subsidies as to the number of users of open spaces and their perception of these spaces and point towards a possible calibration which represents the process of climate adaptation. Studies in the area of environmental comfort and climate in open spaces presuppose the acquisition of data pertaining to environmental conditions, the physical characterization of spaces and users’ opinions, gathered by subjective answers. The last years have shown that, despite the technology used in field researches, part of this information could be acquired in a more dynamic manner. The development of the application led us to think of it as merely a questionnaire, as it would be more direct and easy to understand. Furthermore, an application with a questionnaire could be interesting, as campus users can voice their opinion and make their criticisms (or compliments) heard. The mobile application was developed, initially, for the investigation of user comfort in open spaces of the Campus Cidade Universitaria Armando Salles Oliveira, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, but can also be used for the analysis of other open urban spaces. The application was developed for Android systems, with the following characteristics regarded as relevant: easy to understand; clear; organized; easy to read. It should also be visually instinctive to the user, making the data acquisition process more agile and also enabling the rapid and dynamic treatment of the data, providing fast and easy further calculations based on the index of Temperature of Equivalent Perception (TEP) for the assessment of outdoor comfort.