Thermal pleasure in built environments: spatial alliesthesia from contact heating: Fid-Bau Portal

Thermal pleasure in built environments: spatial alliesthesia from contact heating

Parkinson, Thomas / de Dear, Richard

The comfort zone is bounded by thermal environmental conditions that may be described as acceptably cool or acceptably warm, and engineering out of existence these innocuous thermal conditions on the fringes of the adaptive comfort range may not be necessary. In contrast to the conventional understanding of local discomfort, spatial alliesthesia exploits corrective differences in the rate of change in skin temperature between individual body segments to elicit positive affective sensations. This paper examines reverse instances of local discomfort, or spatial alliesthesia, from warm contact stimuli applied to hand and feet when exposed to ambient conditions towards the lower margin of the comfort zone. It was found that subjects with moderate feelings of displeasure or even indifference were still capable of experiencing a pleasant response to localized thermal stimuli. Brief whole-body thermal pleasure was observed from in-situ skin temperature changes at a single distal body site. These effects were subtle and not universally experienced, so the success of their deliberate implementation in built environments depends heavily on some form of individual control. Spatial alliesthesia therefore complements the body of literature investigating personal environmental control and local thermal discomfort by providing a theoretical framework of thermal perception in non-neutral environments.