Residential Dwelling

Engelen, Rahmann, and de Jong reviewed published studies to learn more about how design influences Quality of Life (QoL) of older individuals.  They report that their work “takes a cross-disciplinary approach to understand the current evidence of the relationship between design, healthy ageing and QoL. . . . The extracted literature suggests there is good evidence for the role of biophilia, and indoor environmental quality; emerging evidence for technology, wayfinding, and opportunities for social interactions; but limited evidence for safety/security and adaptability/fit.

Puglisi and colleagues studied the experiences of people working remotely and it seems likely that their findings can be applied more generally.  The researchers report that data they collected via surveys completed by remote workers “show that 55% of the workers perform their activity in an isolated room of the home environment, 43% in a shared room (e.g., kitchen, living room), and 2% in an outdoor space, with the majority of workers (57%) performing activity without other people in the environment. . . .

Ruger, Stawarz, Skora, and Wiernik studied individuals’ willingness to commute and their findings have implications for locating both homes and workplaces.   The researchers report that  “We use unique longitudinal data from four European countries – Germany, France, Spain, and Switzerland – to examine the relationship between individual level willingness to commute long distances (i.e. at least 60 min one-way) and actual commuting behavior. . .