【BENV0054】Environmental Science

Coursework Aims (Learning Outcomes)

Upon successful completion of the coursework, the student should be able to:

• Define wellbeing.

• Identify appropriate techniques for measuring wellbeing in practice.

• Understand the difference between laboratory experiments and field studies.

• Understand the complexity of designing experiments and interpreting the data.

• Design an experiment, gain ethics approval and collect data.

• Describe an experiment in all necessary details.

• Analyse and present the experimental results in a cohesive manner that is easy to understand.

• Discuss any flaws in the experimental methodology or measurement techniques.

Learn how to write-up and present experimental results.

• Understand the implications for the future design of offices and make recommendations.

Overall Brief

There are two key parts to the coursework:

1. An introduction (literature review) to an experiment on wellbeing. We recommend initially writing a short essay on how to define and measure wellbeing before converting it into an introduction.

1. Design and conduct a pilot experiment investigating the impact of an element of the built environment on wellbeing. The final submission will include the introduction, method, results and discussion.

However, parts 1 and 2 will be marked as a single piece of coursework, you need to submit one document only.

1. For information and guidance about Turnitin see https://wiki.ucl.ac.uk/display/ELearningStudentSupport/Turnitin

UCL Institute for Environmental Design & Engineering The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment

Further Details

Each student’s submission will be assessed individually.

There will be two experiment teams. The experiment will be designed and conducted as a group activity but the data must then be shared so that each student can carry out their own analysis and write-up. The initial essay should be reformatted or written in such a way that it forms the introduction to the experiment report.

It is recommended that each student volunteer as a subject for their classmates’ experiments, ideally participating in all the teams’ experiments. However, participation is not compulsory and is entirely voluntary. Please note: other friends and volunteers who are not part of this module are NOT permitted to act as volunteers. See section on ethics and data protection for further details. It is accepted that the experiment may have limitations due to the limited number of subjects, but it may be considered a pilot or concept study.

Student need to participate in one of two groups; the possible topics are biophilia and sound. The experiment might, for example, compare the impact of different real, simulated or virtual stimuli related to biophilia and / or sounds on various metrics of wellbeing. Similarly, the subjects may be monitored in a “laboratory” pre- and post-exposure to a different environment. Any changes to environmental variables will need to kept within safe levels recommended by relevant standards and best practice guidelines.

A mixture of quantitative/qualitative and subjective/objective measures are expected. The experiment should include at least four of the following metrics:

.Please note that you do not need to analyse all available measures within one category, e.g. for subjective responses you do not need to include all that have been measured.

1. A subjective response – for example paper or on-line questionnaire responses of comfort, performance and hedonic wellbeing,

1. Performance task – either paper based or on-line or app based including cognitive tasks and brain games etc,

1. Physiological measurement – i.e. galvanic skin response or pulse using lab-based or wearable technology,

1. Environmental condition – measured with monitoring equipment e.g. temperature logger or sound level meter.

1. Environmental description – demonstrated through photographs, expert observation and/or subject assessment.

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