An Introduction to the SONATA Project
The SONATA project has been funded by Horizon Europe to tackle the health and wellbeing challenges in our shared workspaces. Here, we aim to introduce you to the current challenges that the project will tackle, why it is so important that these issues are addressed, and the innovative ways in which SONATA will contribute to a solution.
Health and Wellbeing Challenges in Our Changing Workspaces
Even before the digital and green “twin” transitions, the use of open-plan workspaces had been widely adopted by many organisations. Whilst such spaces offer flexibility in accommodating a wide variety of simultaneous tasks, not least at a time when workforce presence can be unpredictable or intermittent, the majority of workers express dissatisfaction with such working environments. This dissatisfaction goes beyond mere discomfort, with workers reporting negative impacts on health, wellbeing, productivity, and social relations. The most common aspects of workplace design which occupants identify as harmful are those which lead to acoustic discomfort, a perceived lack of control of environmental conditions, insufficient space, and privacy-related concerns.
It is generally believed that these complaints can cause or exacerbate physical wellbeing issues like fatigue and musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), mental wellbeing issues like stress, anxiety, and depression; and a variety of eye-related and sedentary physical health symptoms. The knock-on effects of these health impacts can ultimately undermine the performance of an entire organisation through heightened sickness absence, disengagement and high employee turnover.
So, how does SONATA aim to mitigate these negative impacts?
Orchestrated Adaptive Architecture as Workplace Design Intervention
So-called ‘adaptive’ architectural technologies already try to manage these health and wellbeing challenges by automating a wide range of architectural building services, such as ‘smart’ shading, HVAC, and lighting systems, flexible office partitions, work activity-focused spaces, or height-adjustable desks. However, post-occupancy studies continue to demonstrate how these adaptive technologies still cannot ameliorate all complaints, mainly because they cannot address all the existing risk factors (e.g. density, acoustic, visual disturbances), they operate agnostically of individual preferences, are too impractical, time-consuming or socially embarrassing for people to control, and overlook how the human comfort requirements of the multiple workers that share the same space often do not align.
Instead, SONATA aims to not only develop novel adaptive technologies as well as make several existing technologies more adaptive but will also prioritise the worker experience. This will be achieved by investigating how the use of these technologies will impact the individual directly, and how a worker’s environmental preferences may be incorporated into the control mechanisms of these technological solutions via a human-building interface. Impact will be measured for each adaptive architectural technology separately, as well as in combination with each other, during controlled lab settings, as well as in living labs and real-world workspaces. With a focus on the shared workspace, workers, like the adaptive technologies, will not be considered in isolation. A key part of the investigation will consider how to equitably distribute positive impacts of these technologies across as many workers as possible.
Towards Implementation
As SONATA is committed to improving the health and wellbeing impacts for workers, it is vital that the project findings are made implementable in real world workspace settings. Therefore, from the unique combination of scientific experiments that shape the SONATA methodology, a collection of evidence-based recommendations and guidelines will be produced. These recommendations will be analysed for cost benefit, sustainability, and implementation barriers, with the active support of several societal key target groups, including commercial manufacturers, architectural offices, workplace innovation consultants, health and sustainable building consultants, and national building certificate bodies, represented within the consortium and through its extended network. In this way, SONATA is ideally placed to ensure that its findings will ultimately benefit the people at the centre of this project – the workers.
Why is SONATA Unique?
The SONATA project is distinctive in multiple ways. Firstly, SONATA is completely unique in testing the impact of multiple ‘adaptive’ architectural technologies within a single shared workspace: tinting the glass, directing the light, adapting the light emission spectrum, steering the ventilation, lowering the acoustic panelling, robotically moving the physical partitions and adjusting the desk heights.
Secondly, SONATA will generate empirical knowledge on how the health and wellbeing effects of these multiple co-located adaptative architectural technologies could be orchestrated together, so that their combined health and wellbeing effect will become greater than the sum of the separate technologies.
Thirdly, SONATA investigates how the health and wellbeing effects from these adaptations can become equitably negotiated between the varying – and often conflicting – work situations that co-exist in a shared workspace, and which are determined by the unpredictably dynamic nature of work activities along with the changing personal needs and subjective preferences of the individuals that execute them.
Lastly, the SONATA methodology brings together academic experts from health and wellbeing, architectural computation, and social sciences and humanities with commercial manufacturers and key stakeholder representatives. Find out more about Our Team. This interdisciplinary approach not only combines scientifically validated empirical evidence, with real-world prototype installations and critically analysed considerations but could also potentially lead to novel products and services.
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