ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 crisis has created a massive shift in working and living patterns for people all across the world. We don’t fully understand the overall impact on individual health and wellbeing from working remotely, but interim results from extensive global surveys indicate an increase in physiological and psychological concerns including an increase in musculoskeletal pain, loss of sleep, deterioration in diet and exercise, and an increase in work-related stress. The fundamental knowledge provided in this book’s overarching contents is, therefore, crucial at this time. Employers and employees are now concerned about reentry strategies which include how safe and healthy work places can be provided as well as continuously monitored for health and safety. Given this situation, there is an urgent need to conduct rigorous and scientifically accurate human health and built environment research and design followed by real-world applications. This concluding chapter clearly identifies and articulates the existing knowledge gaps in this field and proposes future research directions and potentials for built environment design and research. The chapter is organized around three basic themes: technologies, research methods and studies, and design methods and systems. We suggest the directions for human, environmental, and material sensing technology development including Internet of Things (IoT) device developments. Furthermore, smart materials may be linked with actuation and sensing devices to enable real-time responsiveness with human interaction. The connection of intelligent material systems through these smart sensing techniques with the IoT provides a vast territory of unexplored potential in shifting the design of our built environments towards performative actions for human wellbeing. Precedent examples of recent design research on smart materials and intelligent material systems are presented as an overview of concepts in bio-responsive design with emerging materials. Both the potential advantages and the challenges or limitations for bio-responsive systems are discussed. We also discuss the need for addressing numerous variations in research studies (built environment types and human subject group types) to further develop core findings that are both generalizable and specific to different design scenarios. We conclude with a forecast on the directions of new systems such as immersive environments, material products, and IoT networks, and address the ethics of such possible bio-responsive environments.
