Notion Of Comfort Research Articles

The Disabling Art Museum

This article examines museums and their furnishing, arguing that benches, seats and the very notion of comfort have a disabling or enabling function. A little studied aspect of visuality in museums, furniture admits some visitors and not others. Using New York’s Museum of Modern Art as the basis for its critique, the author gives an impressionistic account of how furnishing and comfort shape the museum visitor’s experience, but also reflect broader conceptions of the museum’s role in society.

Wordsworth Learns to Write Elegy

Previous articleNext article No AccessWordsworth Learns to Write ElegyPamela WoofPamela Woof Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 46, Number 2Spring 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24888058 Views: 27Total views on this site © 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Evolving opportunities for providing thermal comfort

The building industry needs a fundamental paradigm shift in its notion of comfort, to find low-energy ways of creating more thermally dynamic and non-uniform environments that bring inhabitants pleasure. Strategies for providing enriched thermal environments must be conjoined with reducing energy; these are inseparable for any building striving for high performance. The objective of current comfort standards is to have no more than 20% of occupants dissatisfied, yet buildings are not reaching even that scant goal. A significant energy cost is incurred by the current practice of controlling buildings within a narrow range of temperatures (often over-cooling in the summer). If building designers and operators can find efficient ways to allow building temperatures to float over a wider range, while affording occupants individual control of comfort, the potential for energy savings is enormous. Five new ways of thinking, or paradigm shifts, are presented for designing or operating buildings to provide enhanced thermal experiences. They are supported by examples of research conducted by the Center for the Built Environment, and include shifts from centralized to personal control, from still to breezy air movement, from thermal neutrality to delight, from active to passive design, and from system disengagement to improved feedback loops.

THE FUTURE OF HOUSES: WHAT REAL-ESTATE ADS TELL ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF SINGLE-FAMILY DWELLINGS

This research questions the evolution of people’s preferences by analyzing 6750 real-estate ads published at three different decades (1985, 1995 and 2005) and in three distinct geographic areas of France (North, West and South). Our purpose is to establish the importance, at each time frame and location, of the different elements that compose the house in order to elaborate on the evolution and future of the house. The results show that the evolution of this type of dwelling is twofold: changes in the use of space and changes in the notion of comfort.

Neighbourhoods or nothing? Social relations in David Lynch's Blue Velvet

Abstract David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) raises significant questions concerning small-town social relations in the United States, the corrupting powers of industrial urbanism and the notion of propinquity. It is a vivid rejoinder to the idealization of the small town and to comfortable notions of community in general. Through a close reading of the spatial strategies employed in Blue Velvet, this article maps Lynch’s conception of the neighbour and the neighbourhood. The analysis encompasses the political rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin, the planning ideas of New Urbanism and critiques of the neighbour articulated by Freud and Žižek, as well as placing Blue Velvet in the context of Lynch’s other work.

The use of non-pharmacological nursing interventions on the comfort of cancer patients: A comprehensive systematic review protocol

The use of non-pharmacological nursing interventions on the comfort of cancer patients: A comprehensive systematic review protocol

Does Energy Efficiency Reduce Emissions and Peak Demand? A Case Study of 50 Years of Space Heating in Melbourne

This paper examines the relationship between space heating energy efficiency and two related but distinct measures; greenhouse mitigation, and peak demand. The historic role of Melbourne’s space heating provides an opportunity to assess whether improvements in energy efficiency lead to sustained reductions in energy consumption or whether rebound factors “take back” efficiency gains in the long run. Despite significant and sustained improvements in appliance efficiency, and the thermal efficiency of new building fabrics, the per-capita heating energy consumption has remained remarkably stable over the past 50 years. Space heating efficiency is bound up with notions of comfort, sufficiency and lifestyle, and the short-run gains from efficiency become incorporated into a new set of norms. It is this evolution of cultural norms that reconciles the contradiction between the short-run gains from efficiency measures, with the efficiency rebound that becomes evident over the long-term. The related, but distinct peak demand measure can be influenced by efficiency measures, but energy efficiency measures will not alter the requirement for large-scale conventional energy to provide affordable and reliable winter heating.

‘Helping People Make Better Choices’: Exploring the behaviour change agenda for environmental sustainability

This paper examines the emergence of market-orientated approaches to public participation in environmental issues through an exploration of recent empirical research into ‘sustainable lifestyles’ as a practical tool for encouraging pro-environmental behaviour. Using the notion of ‘sustainable lifestyles’, current social marketing policies seek to encourage behaviour change amongst citizens by identifying population segments with similar commitments to environmental practices as the basis for behaviour change initiatives. However, the use of static ‘lifestyle groups’ implies that that citizens replicate sustainable practices across different consumption contexts and this paper explores this line of argument through the use of data collected as part of a recent UK Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) funded research project on sustainable lifestyles and climate change. Through a series of focus group discussions, participants explored notions of sustainable practices using the home and leisure contexts as framing devices to explore issues of environmental responsibility and climate change. The emphasis placed on practices and context reveal that the comfortable notions of environmental responsibility and sustainable consumption in the home are often in conflict with the discourses of consumption reduction associated with climate change in leisure and tourism contexts. In many cases, these ‘paradoxes’ are explicitly referred to, reflected-upon and discussed by participants who demonstrate that notions of sustainable practice are mediated by practice and spaces of consumption. Accordingly, the paper argues that in conceptualising market-based approaches to behaviour change around the notion of ‘sustainable lifestyles’, researchers and policy makers need to address the role of context and recognise the importance of consumption spaces and the conflicts that may arise between these.

Moving forward: Conceptualizing comfort in information sources for enthusiast cyclists

This research aims to identify how the notion of comfort in the context of bicycling is conveyed in an American bicycling magazine and online forum. An iterative approach, comprising of a content analysis and linguistic discourse analysis aims to go beyond the generally-accepted definition that focuses on vibrations, and identify the different concepts and typical situations relevant to study comfort for enthusiast cyclists. Are discussed the selection criteria for the magazine and online forum, the development of the coding protocol (including the final operational definition of each concepts) and the method for retrieving and analyzing online forum posts. A quantitative analysis, looking at the number of occurrences for each concept and theme, combined with a qualitative analysis of pronoun use, positive and negative descriptors, and opposing statements shows a complex link between the cyclist, the bicycle, and the environment. The behaviour of the bicycle, environmental factors, what the cyclists thinks and feels as well as the goal of the ride affect how comfort is conceptualized.

From occupying to inhabiting – a change in conceptualising comfort

The concept of 'comfort' has been influential in shaping aspects of our built environment. For the construction industry, comfort is predominantly understood in terms of the balance between an ideal human physiological state and a finite number of measurable environmental parameters that can be controlled (temperature, humidity, air quality, daylighting, noise). It is such a notion of comfort that has informed the establishment of universally applied comfort standards and guidelines for the built environment. When buildings rigidly conform to these standards, they consume vast quantities of energy and are responsible for higher levels of GHG emissions. Recent researchers have challenged such instrumental definitions of comfort on moral and environmental grounds. In this paper, we address this issue from two different standpoints: one empirical, one related to the design of technology.Empirically, we present an analysis of ethnographic field material that has examined how, in what circumstances, and at what times ordinary users employ energy-intensive indoor climate technologies in their daily lives. We argue that when comfort is viewed as an achievement, rather than as a reified and static ideal homeostasis between humans and their environmental conditions, it becomes easier to appreciate the extent to which comfort is, for ordinary people, personally idiosyncratic, culturally relative, socially influenced and highly dependent on temporality, sequence and activity. With respect to design, we introduce a set of provocative designed prototypes that embody alternative conceptions of 'comfort' than those to which the building industry typically subscribes.Our discussion has critical implications for the types of technologies that result from a 'comfort standards' conception. Firstly, we show that comfort is not simply a homeostatic equilibrium–such a view is overly narrow, inflexible and ultimately an inaccurate conception of what comfort is for ordinary people; secondly, that it promotes technologies that treat environmental parameters as variables for our manipulation, rather than opportunities to reflect on, and adjust our own (temporal human) fit with our environment. Borrowing from Cole et al. [4], we argue for technologies that enable users to inhabit rather than occupy the built environment.

Climate Change and Residential Electricity Demand in Europe

Temperature influences our notion of comfort and thus the ways we equip, heat, and cool our homes in part reflect this. This paper views electricity use in part as a phenomenon of adaptation to changes in weather and provides estimates of climate change impacts on electricity consumption in Europe. Constructing a data set on weather across a panel of European countries, we employ a concept of comfort which relates electricity consumption to outdoor temperatures, to estimate the parameters of electricity demand. The results suggest that random weather variations have a statistically significant impact on residential electricity demand. With climatic changes, Northern Europeans will reduce their heating demand and Southern Europeans will increase their cooling demand. On average, the results suggest that climate change will reduce European energy demand. But the magnitude of this net benefit is small, and likely less important than other changes such as income.

Risking comfort? The impact of in‐water constraints on recreational scuba diving

A substantial body of work has considered the role and impact of constraints on the leisure experience. Recent research in leisure constraints theory, however, has moved beyond a preoccupation with barriers to access and identified the importance of in situ constraints and their impact on the leisure experience itself. New directions in constraints research are needed to expand our understanding of in situ constraints in leisure segments like adventure recreation. This paper presents the findings of an interpretive, qualitative study of how in situ (or ‘in‐water') constraints impacted on the experiences of 27 recreational scuba divers in Australia. The notion of comfort as it applies to adventure leisure and diving is also explored. Using a grounded approach to analysis, it was revealed that divers’ comfort was constrained in physical, psychological, social, and visual contexts. This suite of constraints worked to limit, disrupt, or impede divers’ in‐water comfort, bringing discomfort or uncertainty into a dive. The implications and application of these findings for adventure leisure research and practical management of the scuba dive experience are discussed.

Recovering Public Memory: Politics, Aesthetics and Contempt

It's the weekend – leisure time. It's the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the 'total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production' in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily 'treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.' But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of 'political economy': 'the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the 'perfected denial of man'.' (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the 'perfected denial' of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.

Re-contextualizing the notion of comfort

To what extent can the urgency of climate change and an evolving concept of agency (at the individual and social levels of building users) create a new context for rethinking the notion of comfort? A new, emerging notion of comfort is explored that embraces engagement with new conditions, new experiences, and new types of interactions between inhabitants and building systems and unfamiliar technologies. The emphasis is on communication and dialogue as two dynamic and adaptive processes necessary to achieve optimal building performance while valuing and responding to inhabitant knowledge and agency, and enhancing indoor environmental quality from the standpoint of the inhabitants. A primary conclusion is that the goal of shifting into a lower carbon society has created a new context for comfort, from its conventional emphasis as automated, uniform and predictable, to a broader notion that takes into consideration dynamic, integrated, and participatory aspects. The key dimensions of this emergent broader view of comfort are examined and the relationships between them revealed. Dans quelle mesure l'urgence du changement climatique et un concept évolutif d'agence (au niveau individuel et social des utilisateurs de bâtiments) créent-t-ils un nouveau contexte où revoir la notion de confort? L'auteur explore une nouvelle notion de confort qui englobe l'engagement avec de nouvelles conditions, de nouvelles expériences et de nouveaux types d'interactions entre les habitants, les systèmes de construction et des technologies nouvelles. L'accent est mis sur la communication et le dialogue comme étant deux processus dynamiques et adaptatifs nécessaire pour obtenir des performances de construction optimales tout en donnant sa valeur et en répondant à la connaissance des habitants et à l'agence et en améliorant la qualité de l'environnement intérieur du point de vue des habitants. Selon une conclusion majeure, l'objectif visé qui est de passer à une société émettant moins de carbone a donné naissance à un nouveau contexte de confort, en passant de l'accent classique sur l'automatisation, l'uniformité et la prévisibilité à une notion plus large qui prend en considération des aspects dynamiques, intégrés et participatifs. L'auteur analyse les dimensions principales de cette idée émergente et élargie de confort ainsi que les relations entre elles. Mots cle´s: comportement adaptatif, agence, changement climatique, confort, communication, dialogue, demande d'énergie, qualité de l'environnement intérieur, habitant, occupant, interactions sociales, développement durable, lieu de travail

Neuroethics: Toward Broader Discussion

To the Editor: In their article Monitoring and Manipulating Brain Function (HCR, May-June 2004), Martha Farah and Paul Wolpe review ways in which research in cognitive neuroscience is bearing fruit, the consumption of which may prove to further our loss of innocence. The terms monitoring and manipulation add a sinister undertone to the more comfortable notions of diagnosis and treatment. In the near future, brain imaging might monitor intentions and desires rather than

The Battlegrounds of Theory

The most important contribution made by the interdisciplinary field of to intellectual may well be questioning of the unidisciplinary model of 'history' as the sole paradigm for studying relationships between different thinkers. Tilottama Rajan & Michael J. O'Driscoll, After Poststructuralism The past as always has been and always will be necessarily configured, troped, emplotted, read, mythologised and ideologised in ways to suit ourselves. Keith Jenkin, Why History? PRACTICE IS ALWAYS ALREADY THEORY. (1) Notwithstanding familiar views to the contrary and impatience in some fields with what is perceived to be too much attention to at the expense of practice, (2) it is possible to argue that is as old as language and culture. But as study in its own right, assuredly interdisciplinary, and parading itself as irresistibly difficult as well as inevitable, theory's place in the curriculum as is very recent. And what development it has been. Given our propensity for innovation, underscored by all of those apocalyptic murmurings and institutional imperatives, theory's battleground is packed with heroic figures, claims, counter-claims, returns, re-runs and occasional acts of vilification. As the wars give way to minor skirmishes, camp followers mop up around the edges and we gather our energies for the next negotiation. Following the linguistic turn and poststructuralism's unsettling of comfortable notions of origin, continuity and evolutionary progression, there is indeed, as the editors of After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of concede, special challenge in writing an intellectual of Theory. The point is, of course, that History gives way to histories and, in the best of all possible senses, after poststructuralism is an inclusive not exclusive discourse, the interest and values of which will depend not so much upon reduced notions of linearity, nor indeed of newness, but upon subtleties of argument in the remaking of connections. (3) Written from the near side of the contemporary turn to in the humanities (3), these essays are characteristically well-informed, investigative and demanding; they make valuable contribution to thinking about as an interdisciplinary field (of battle) whose connections, interests and applications are decidedly provocative and multifarious. The editors arrange the contributions around four metatheoretical figures or tropics of theory which, they point out, are not exhaustive but heuristic: genealogies, performativities, physiologies and technologies. The boundaries are porous and, as the essays indicate, processes of contamination and combination refigure the field. Choosing Foucault's term, they emphasize the ways in which invites rereading of history attentive to the blind spots of misrecognition and aporia and to complicated forms of interplay. Performativity is a synchronic counterpart to genealogy (5) that allows for staging, as it were, outside chronology and influence. When it is linked to Derrida's repetition with difference, it nevertheless holds an each-way bet by allowing the performance trope its specificity while holding, as well, to the ghosts of connection. Physiology is held to allow libidinal economy of history, one with an investment of anxiety, abjection, desire or attachment in ways held to be closer than the rhetoric of mere influence. Technologies is deployed with respect not to the machinic but to the technologies of language, the construction of subjects and of writing--that is to say, by foregrounding the hard edge of self-conscious practice itself. Situated in Part I Genealogies, Stanley Corngold returns to Hegel's Aesthetics through de Man's Aesthetic Ideology, focusing on the of comedy located towards the end of the Aesthetics. It is by detecting the rumblings of repressed contradictions (37), such as the problematic relationship between substance and subjectivity but also between tragedy and comedy themselves and their association respectively with the absolute and the ephemeral, that he defines the difficulties and discontinuities of a great ironist (37). …

A “Standard” of Living? European Perspectives on Class and Consumption in the Early Twentieth Century

“It is hard to think of an idea more immediate,” says Amartya Sen, than that of “the living standard. . . . It figures a good deal in everyday thought. It is, in fact, one of the few economic concepts that is not commonly greeted with the uncommon skepticism reserved for the other concepts of economics.”Amartya Sen and John Muellbauer, The Standard of Living (New York, 1987), 1. At the turn of our century, however, this was certainly not the case. A “standard of living” was neither “immediate” nor “everyday.” The term itself rarely appeared before the 1920s. Even then, observed one economist surveying her contemporaries' vocabulary and assumptions, “all the meaning, and the exact meaning, that is bound up in it” was far from clear. Hazel Kyrk, A Theory of Consumption (New York, 1923), 174. On different meanings, see also Carle Zimmerman, Consumption and Standards of Living (New York, 1936), 4–10; and Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: Workers and the Making of American Consumer Society (Ithaca, 1997), which is reviewed in International Labor and Working-Class History 56 (forthcoming, Fall 1999). It could variously signify a technical measure of purchasing power, an aspiration, or an entitlement—although whether to a minimum subsistence or a more expansive notion of comfort would be bitterly disputed. For many European intellectuals of the 1920s, the term, almost solely used as “American standard,” captured in one phrase the threat or the promise of the increased economic clout of the United States, Fordism as an economic strategy, and a new politics of material abundance. On both sides of the Atlantic, all of these meanings were hotly contested by economists, reform sociologists, political leaders, and the labor movement. In short, some historical scrutiny seems in order. What did the concept mean and when? What light would a genealogy of the “standard of living” shed on the prehistory of “mass consumption” or the transition to new consumer regimes of the twentieth century?

The Garden and the Red Barn: The Pervasive Pastoral and Its Environmental Consequences

Pastoralism is a familiar aesthetic' concept that has been discussed often. In the past, the discussion of pastoralism2 most often has been limited as an intellectual construct utilized mainly in literature and art. Yet pastoral themes constitute a popular, powerful, and pervasive mindset in contemporary American culture. Pastoralism evokes a comfortable notion about the countryside, a landscape that is the majority of land use in this country. Importantly, our attitudes toward and subsequent environmental management of this landscape grow from our perceptions of and pleasures in the countryside. Today it is clear that this popular pastoral aesthetic is at work in our everyday perception of much of the American landscape. Since our environmental record in countryside landscapes is poor but largely goes unnoticed, it is timely to re-examine the pastoral theme in the context of contemporary agricultural landscapes. What is the origin of our countryside pastoral aesthetic? Recently discovered psychological and biological dimensions of pastoralism along with the part it plays in the development of public attitudes toward the countryside require that we re-examine popular pastoralism. This essay employs two distinct but related concepts, the search for a garden and the red barn icon, as means of examining contemporary pastoralism.

Culture Shocks: Feminism and Difference in the Classroom

Across the past two decades movements world-wide have been responding to the question of cultural difference. Comfortable notions of universal sisterhood have increasingly given way to contingent alliances shaped by new understandings of difference power and pluralism. In extending some of the contemporary debates in cross-cultural feminism into the domain of teaching this essay will explore how some of these debates are influencing the methods and ideals underpinning pedagogy and will consider how responsive the feminist classroom has been to a range of cross-cultural dilemmas. As pedagogic practice is inevitably informed by shifting cultural and power politics at play in individual contexts the essay will seek to address some of the specific issues arising in different cultural contexts including the politics of political correctness and multiculturalism in Australia and North America and the politics of colonialism and postcolonialism in Hong Kong. How do these issues affect the meaning(s) of feminism in the classroom? How do they redefine our understanding of radical pedagogy? (authors)

Culture Shocks: Feminism and Difference in the Classroom

Across the past two decades feminist movements world-wide have been responding to the question of cultural difference. Comfortable notions of universal sisterhood have increasingly given way to contingent alliances shaped by new understandings of difference, power, and pluralism. In extending some of the contemporary debates in cross-cultural feminism into the domain of teaching, this essay will explore how some of these debates are influencing the methods and ideals underpinning feminist pedagogy and will consider how responsive the “feminist classroom” has been to a range of cross-cultural dilemmas. As feminist pedagogic practice is inevitably informed by shifting cultural and power politics at play in individual contexts, the essay will seek to address some of the specific issues arising in different cultural contexts, including the politics of “political correctness” and multiculturalism in Australia and North America and the politics of colonialism and postcolonialism in Hong Kong. How do these issues affect the meaning(s) of feminism in the classroom? How do they redefine our understanding of “radical pedagogy”?