The notion of comfort goes back to when our first ancestors developed simple tools to make life easier. What may be surprising is that the idea of personal comfort at work has taken generations to become a key concern and find its way into mainstream rating systems such as LEED, WELL Building Standard (WELL), and Living Building Challenge (LBC).
While comfort can take many definitions, it is commonly thought of as “a state of ease and satisfaction of bodily wants, with freedom from pain and anxiety.”
The belief that work is hard has been around for centuries. But the focus on worker comfort is relatively new. In the late 1800’s, when Frederick Tayler began looking at ways to improve workplace efficiency, a door was opened with a hint of things to come. But it wasn’t until World War II that individual comfort and the interaction between man and machine came into focus.