Comfort

Comfort as a limiting factor in transformation and innovation.

What are the reasonable criteria and goals for design if they are not hedonistic?

Examples such as passive housing can serve as an illustration on limitations that ensure from the commitment to comfort that is too strong. Instead of changing the way we live, we change the way we build.

Cf.

• Health
• evolutionary medicine
• the role of stress (all types of stress, e.g. physical, psychological, social, etc.) in health and disease
• the role of discomfort in learning and growth
• the dynamics of living systems, their constant self-construction that is a response to the challenges, negative consequences from the removal of challenges or too much comfort/hedonism (obesity, loss of function/mobility/mental acuity, etc.)
• salutogenic design
• there is a lot of literature directly on things like thermal comfort, acoustic comfort, etc. but that stays in the frame of what is acceptable now, mostly, so you should look at more foundational concepts and practices, make a taxonomy of example?

References

Bixler, Robert D., and Myron F. Floyd. “Nature Is Scary, Disgusting, and Uncomfortable.” Environment and Behavior 29, no. 4 (1997): 443–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/001391659702900401.

Chappells, Heather, and Elizabeth Shove. “Debating the Future of Comfort: Environmental Sustainability, Energy Consumption and the Indoor Environment.” Building Research & Information 33, no. 1 (2005): 32–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/0961321042000322762.

Illich, Ivan. Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health. New York: Random House, 1976.

Ong, Boon Lay, ed. Beyond Environmental Comfort. New York: Routledge, 2013.