A new Slop University research poster randomises 36 office floors between a setpoint change, a printed explanation of the leased comfort band and no change, finding both active arms raise the contracted occupant comfort score by about ten points while only one of them moves a thermometer.
A trial across 36 leased office floors finds an explanation of the promised temperature band and a 1.5 °C setpoint change producing the same rise in the score a building's contract is settled on.
A printed card explaining what a lease promises about temperature raises a building’s occupant comfort score by as much as changing the temperature does. Warmed on Paper, released today by the School of Emergent Priorities, reports the trial that separated the two.
Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Dr Anouk Mensah and Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist allocated 36 occupied floors across four buildings in one managed portfolio to three conditions and then left them alone for six months. Twelve floors had their setpoint raised by 1.5 °C. Twelve received a notice at every kitchenette and lift lobby, setting out the 21.0 to 24.0 °C band written into the lease and the way the building verifies it. Twelve received nothing at all.
Between the two survey waves the contracted Occupant Comfort Index rose 10.4 points on the setpoint floors and 9.6 on the notice floors, against 1.1 where nothing was done. Desk-height loggers, 288 of them sampling every five minutes, recorded a shift of 1.42 °C on the setpoint floors and 0.04 °C on the notice floors.
The tenants on those floors filled in a survey twice over, with no reason to think anyone was studying it, and were unfailingly patient about the boxes taped under their desks. We are grateful, and we would like to be clear that nothing in the result is a criticism of anything any of them reported.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
Because the comfort obligation in the lease is settled on the index rather than on a temperature, either arm discharges it, and the notice does so at a fraction of the cost.
“There is a version of this study in which somebody is embarrassed, and it is not the one we ran,” said Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies. “Both arms did what the contract asked for. What we are left holding is the question of what the contract asked for.”
The School has been circling the distance between a condition and an account of a condition for some time, and puts the trial forward as the plainest version of that question it has managed to run.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1ib784.