PhD on natural visual patterns, mental wellbeing, and overheating resilience

Are you fascinated by the influence of nature on our emotions and behaviour? Passionate about nature-inspired facade design and its influence on occupant comfort and wellbeing? Eager to embark on a multidisciplinary research project and collaborate with industry partners? If so, then this PhD position might be perfect for you.

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Can we reduce stress, thermal discomfort and energy consumption for cooling in homes by harnessing visual exposure to nature-inspired facade designs? Can we disentangle the beneficial effects of daylight and nature exposure through windows? How can we best navigate the trade-off between access to view and the amount and quality of daylight and nature content provided by a nature-inspired façade? These are some of the scientific challenges you will work on in this PhD project.

This PhD position is part of the wider ΝWO KIC project “Nature4Homes: Nature-driven building skin interventions for energy efficiency, occupant comfort, health, and biodiversity in dwellings”, which brings together the domains of building engineering, building physics, environmental psychology, meteorology, and thermophysiology to develop nature-driven building skin solutions that enhance occupant health and comfort while reducing cooling demand. This PhD project focuses specifically on the domains of environmental psychology, lighting research, and building physics.

You will conduct your research within the Human-Technology Interaction group (HTI) at TU/e, which has a long history in lighting research and environmental psychology, with a secondment at the Environmental & Climate Design section at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), which has extensive expertise in building physics and indoor environmental quality.

In this PhD, you will investigate whether visual patterns from nature across different layers of the building skin (e.g., the façade itself, the view to the outside) within an occupant’s field of view can support mental wellbeing, increase acceptance, and enhance tolerance to visual and thermal discomfort indoors, particularly during periods of summer overheating. To address these questions, you will review the literature, perform experiments in virtual reality and real conditions, co-create nature-inspired façade elements, and test them in field studies. Your work would include collecting self-reported, physiological, and environmental data, and apply building simulation, computer vision, and advanced statistical methods for their analysis. The project also involves close collaboration with industry partners such as shading system manufacturers to develop nature-inspired façade interventions. These will be tested at the “Green Village” living lab housing of TU Delft. Throughout your PhD, you will be supervised by Dr. Kynthia Chamilothori (main supervisor) and Prof. Yvonne de Kort (promotor) at the Human-Technology Interaction group of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), as well as Dr. Eleonora Brembilla (co-promotor) at the Environmental & Climate Design section at TU Delft. You will be based at TU/e with a secondment at TU Delft.