Indoor Air Quality
The composition and movement of indoor air: ventilation rates, CO2, particulates, volatile organic compounds, humidity and pathogen transmission. It connects building services engineering to health and cognitive outcomes — with an evidence base that strengthened dramatically through pandemic-era research.
IAQ carries some of the strongest environmental-performance evidence in the workplace canon: ventilation and CO2 levels show measurable associations with cognitive performance and sickness absence in multiple studies, and airborne transmission research made ventilation a duty-of-care question. It is also invisible — the environmental variable occupants cannot see and buildings routinely under-deliver.
- What ventilation performance do occupied densities actually require?
- What do CO2 and pollutant levels indicate about building operation?
- What does the evidence support on air quality and cognitive performance?
- How should IAQ be monitored and reported without inducing either complacency or alarm?
- Ventilation and cognition studies (Allen et al. and successors — promising, with replication and generalisation caveats)
- Ventilation standards (EN 16798, ASHRAE 62.1)
- Pandemic-era transmission and ventilation research
- Continuous IAQ monitoring data
Ventilation specified against actual planned densities, not code minimums; continuous monitoring in occupied zones with transparent reporting; density decisions tested against ventilation capacity; IAQ as a standing recalibration variable, not a handover checkbox.
Architectural Guidance
The translation of the concept and kit into design-governing guidance: spatial, environmental, acoustic, lighting, thermal, biophilic, accessibility, technology and identity requirements the design team must satisfy.
Occupancy Assessment
Occupancy validates, challenges and enriches workplace demand — measuring how space is actually used, not how its use is reported.
Spatial Performance Review
The periodic re-assessment of spatial supply against evolved demand — the Diagnose-phase taxonomy discipline operating as a standing review.
Post-Occupancy Evaluation
The structured test of whether the delivered workplace performs as the strategy claimed — measured against the baselines, criteria and accepted sacrifices recorded before it was built.
Reporting cognitive-performance percentages from single studies as established fact, and monitoring theatre — sensors installed, dashboards displayed, ventilation never actually adjusted. The evidence supports taking IAQ seriously; it does not support the precise productivity arithmetic vendors quote.
Dose-response relationships between ventilation and cognition, and the long-run health economics of IAQ investment, are active and unsettled research areas.