Environmental Technologies
Environmental technologies have no "visible" presence, and as such, have been the most disconnected from both the design process and the resulting physical artifact. As a practice based discipline, architecture is understood and characterized through its results: the physical manifestation of design. Its physical presence as a visual artifact is the result that others judge, and its interior environments are the results that others measure. Whereas the former tends to the qualitative, the latter certainly intends to be quantitative. Notwithstanding the frequent attempts to provide a qualitative physical presence for these technologies, whether through a formal determinism or by an aestheticization of components, the current approach is performance based, presuming that the technologies can be optimized either for the reduction of energy or for the improvement of interior environmental conditions. Descriptors such as "high-performance," "performance metrics" and/or "intelligent building" are used to earmark a technological approach that relies heavily on measurement, presuming that optimal control will minimize energy use. This focus on measurement, and, of course, its corollary of simulation, has brought a distinctive definition to the field, resulting in an unprecedented foregrounding of environmental technologies
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The focus of our work in environmental technologies at Harvard Graduate School of Design points in a different direction. Building technologies, and most particularly, environmental technologies, are relatively immune to the rapid cycles off invention and development that occur in the engineering fields, as well as in many of the other design fields such as product design. Indeed, our current technology for heating and cooling buildings was developed over a century ago. Rather than accepting the status quo, and working to improve the performance of the existing systems and technologies, the research in Environmental Technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design is questioning the accepted paradigms by rethinking the phenomenological relationship between the physical behavior of heat, light and sound and the physiological response of the human body. The body has long been ignored in much of the development taking place in environmental systems over the twentieth century, even though it is the body, not the building, these technologies must serve. The advent of significant advancements in the sciences coupled with the development of an excellent array of simulation tools, provides us now with the opportunity as well as the responsibility for re-characterizing this field.
In recognition of the diverse knowledge that must be integrated into developing a more fundamental understanding of what these technologies should ultimately do, we have reached out to other disciplines in an unprecedented effort to collaborate academically, rather than only professionally. Faculty and doctoral students have worked with disciplines ranging from theoretical physics to visual psychology, and have joint projects with many of Harvard's other graduate schools including the School of Public Health. The specific subjects studied and researched, however seemingly diverse, all retain the central objective of building a coherent theory based on physical law, whether through the questioning of existing systems and strategies or through the development of new approaches. Following is a list of some of the recently completed thesis titles in this area, as well as a list of the theses and topics of the current doctoral students.