Patterns for Health

Homeowners, designers, and architects have long desired for a way to better interact with the worlds that they inhabit, and create better environments for themselves and the people that depend on them. Unfortunately, as it true with most protected disciplines, the barrier to entry of many techniques is higher than most people will comfortably meet.

Rules of thumb – such as those elaborated upon in the Daylighting Pattern Guide – are very useful for allowing non-expert groups to create more holistically designed environments, and to incorporate technologies and techniques that they might not fully understand. Despite the relative ease that these rules can be incorporated into the average home, they often still require a higher base understanding of design than the mean person. This is where a parametric solution would excel.

Creating a tool that provides instant feedback as well as simple controls would allow for more people to quickly gain the knowledge necessary to use these established rules of thumb. This opportunity is the end-goal of Patterns for Health – to create a web-tool and simple interface to allow normal people to diagnose issues with their existing spaces, and to suggest specific and unique solutions to their unique problems.

The above images are examples of the two proposed tool types that were piloted in this study which produce still image visualizations and dynamic temporal animations as  a way to understand various simulated data shown here: ventilation rate, air movement and direction at specific points in a volumetric space, temperature and relative humidity, risk of aerosol-based disease transmission (in this case COVID), and daylight availability. The following animations visualize the temporal data that was generated using the simulation and visualization tools developed as part of this pilot study:

With the addition of an open skylight, the air movement within the space is immediately increased and could be leveraged for air quality improvements and natural ventilation.