A hypertextual tool for comfort design

Environmental comfort is usually overlooked during both the design and the construction of a building. This may be due to inadequate understanding of the subject on the part of designers and builders, or to a lack of information concerning predictive design methods, the extent to which comfort requirements can be included in the contract specifications, and the methods and tools available for checking whether the results expected are achieved. A hypertextual tool devised to familiarise architects with the issues relating to the quality of an indoor environment is presented. Reference has been made to the latest rational theories about thermal, visual, acoustic and olfactory comfort in the preparation of data packages that are easy to consult in accordance with a hypertext logic, and are coupled with congruent calculation routines related to these theories for the execution of design and checking operations. User-friendly visualisation of the results has been adopted to make the comfort index data easier to understand.