About Social Media Today
Our last post asked what we might draw from a global study of 500 million ‘tweets’ which found people are happiest in the morning – at almost precisely the time when complaints about the air conditioning in office buildings peak.
The author of the twitter study, Scott Golder, commented “It looks like people send AC requests the same time they send emails -- when they're sitting at their desks!”
If that were the case, what should we make of the obvious morning and after-lunch 'surges' in air conditioning service requests? If it takes up to an hour of sitting at a desk for the average person’s metabolic rate to drop back to normal after exercise, it seems reasonable to expect some level of temporary discomfort (i.e. requests for changes) to show up in the data at those times. Or could it be that most office workers would just rather be somewhere else?!?
To check, we went back to our database of 59,494 requests from office buildings occupants logged between July 2008 and December 2011 and found, sure enough, complaints relating to comfort conditions correspond quite closely with 'help requests' generally, as the following graph illustrates:
Help desk requests from Investa Sustainability Institute Database, July 2008 - Dec 2011
Picking up on Scott Golder’s suggestion, we took a look at the distribution of messaging activity on a corporate email network from his paper Rhythms of Social Interaction (Figure 4 on pg. 9). Spot the difference? I can’t!
If we can better understand how thermal comfort, energy use and people’s moods interact we may be able to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve efficiency at the same time – remembering a building can only be described as energy efficient if it provides a high level of internal environmental quality relative to its use of non-renewable resources. Saving energy is crucial, but it's not sufficient.
Thanks Scott, and thanks to everybody who’s been contributing to the discussion. If you have joined us recently on the feeburner email service, hello, and please feel free to share your thoughts.
We post on the challenge of saving energy and keeping building occupants comfortable, about our action research approach and also share data. We hope that by doing so we can help with the transition to a more sustainable built environment.
