Jasmien Herssens | Universiteit Hasselt (original) (raw)

Papers by Jasmien Herssens

Urban planning, Apr 28, 2022

This article introduces a method for advancing environmental and social sustainability objectives... more This article introduces a method for advancing environmental and social sustainability objectives in relation to home renovations laid out in European and Belgian policies. The comfort tool is an instrument that simultaneously addresses the energy efficiency and universal design aspects of a sustainable home renovation while being usable and meaningful to laymen homeowners and improving their communication with building professionals. It is based on recent research exploring a synergetic merging of energy efficiency and universal design in housing through the concept of indoor environmental comfort. It employs comfort as a way of intervening in the decision-making process for energy efficiency and universal design measures in home renovations. The comfort tool takes a user-centered approach and rests on an interdisciplinary set of theoretical constructs bringing together knowledge from psychology, nursing, design, and building sciences. Besides describing the method itself, the article lays out the theoretical underpinnings and motivations behind its development and discusses relevant future considerations for sustainable home renovations research and practice.

Inclusive design is increasingly receiving attention from researchers and educators in architectu... more Inclusive design is increasingly receiving attention from researchers and educators in architecture and urban planning. Often, however, it is associated with improvement of living environments for people with reduced mobility. The rapidly growing number of older persons who suffer from reduced visual abilities, together with people who are visually impaired represent a considerable percentage of the population. This group raises new questions not only for the medical sector, but also for architectural design and acoustics, where the currently used normative values are optimized for people with "normal" visual abilities. This article discusses questions related to perception of sound and soundscape by people with a visual impairment by combining (1) findings about their superior ability in auditory perception from objective listening test experiments, magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography with (2) insights gained through indepth interviews with and testimonies written by them. In this way we hope to make acousticians and soundscape researchers more aware of the actual diversity in people's sensory abilities.

This joint exhibition by EIDD-DfA and the QUT Design Lab was a collaboration between Europe and A... more This joint exhibition by EIDD-DfA and the QUT Design Lab was a collaboration between Europe and Australia and welcomed QUT as the first academic overseas member to the European Institute for Design and Disability, DFA Europe. This digital exhibition brought together designers, industry, government and academics to connect through Design for All at the QUT CUBE.

Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design, 2019

Given that we live in a time within a growing competitive healthcare market, the customer experie... more Given that we live in a time within a growing competitive healthcare market, the customer experience and healing opportunities are on top of the priority list. However, little attention has been dedicated on how to merge the disciplines of architecture, healthcare and management to create healthcare environments to enhance the customer experience and the healing process. The goal of this paper is to explore how design can foster customer-perceived intimacy within a healthcare context to achieve enhanced customer outcomes, such as customer well-being. Understanding the importance of customer- perceived intimacy is paramount, as customers are constantly exposed to intimate situations. The study suggest that there is potential for such situations to be wrought with problems involving complexities associated with human cognition, emotions, physiological responses, and behaviors. A literature review is undertaken to highlight the antecedents and the short-term and long-term outcomes of c...

Energy Research & Social Science, 2019

Energy efficiency and universal design in housing are high on policy and research agendas. Althou... more Energy efficiency and universal design in housing are high on policy and research agendas. Although in both domains there are policies and programs which aim to convince homeowners to adopt energy efficiency measures or universal design, they have had limited results and rarely take into account the impact on the other domain. Better integration could lead to more sustainable and appealing housing concepts to emerge, resulting in more effective policy. Currently there is scarce research that investigates the integration in private housing of energy efficiency and lifelong living, a physical outcome of universal design principles in housing. This research asks what energy efficiency and lifelong living measures are currently integrated by homeowners and what were the motivations behind the adoption? Nine owner-occupied, privately commissioned, single-family homes in Flanders, which are built to Passive house standards and have also implemented lifelong living measures were examined. Mixed methods were used for analysis including semi-structured interviews with homeowners, architectural drawings and video recording or photographs of a home walk-through. Inhabitants focused on the practical long term effect of their choices on their own families in parallel or above societal impacts of sustainability. It was easier for them to find information on energy efficiency than on universal design. The participants viewed the two fields as either unrelated or as parts of the same goal and so they saw no significant conflicts in their integration. Meanwhile indifference or path dependency from architects and contractors present resistance rather than facilitation towards residents' goals, particularly on universal design.

Publieke ruimte 2008, 2008

Universal Design, of integraal en inclusief ontwerpen voor iedereen, heeft als ultieme doelstelli... more Universal Design, of integraal en inclusief ontwerpen voor iedereen, heeft als ultieme doelstelling de systematische eliminatie van handicapsituaties in mensgemaakte omgevingen. Universal Design is de nieuwe ontwerpbenadering die stap voor stap een academisch en ...

status: published, 2008

Architecture is experienced in a multisensorial way. Moreover, human capacities to perceive archi... more Architecture is experienced in a multisensorial way. Moreover, human capacities to perceive architecture are highly diverse. Unfortunately the emphasis in designing and creating architecture lies in large measure on the visual representation. Other senses are hardly represented ...

Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 2016

Policy and societal objectives indicate a large need for housing renovations that both accommodat... more Policy and societal objectives indicate a large need for housing renovations that both accommodate lifelong living and significantly increase energy efficiency. However, these two areas of research are not yet examined in conjunction and this paper hypothesizes this as a missed opportunity to create better renovation concepts. The paper outlines a comparative review on research in Energy Efficiency and Universal Design in order to find the similarities and differences in both depth and breadth of knowledge. Scientific literature in the two fields reveals a disparate depth of knowledge in areas of theory, research approach, and degree of implementation in society. Universal Design and Energy Efficiency are part of a trajectory of expanding scope towards greater sustainability and, although social urgency has been a driver of the research intensity and approach in both fields, in energy efficiency there is an engineering, problem solving approach while Universal Design has a more soci...

The paper reports on a recent Belgian initiative targeting architectural practice through the pro... more The paper reports on a recent Belgian initiative targeting architectural practice through the professional press. Architecture critics were invited to revisit an exemplary public building while being blindfolded and guided by persons who are visually impaired. Afterwards, they were asked to report on this visit in an article for an architectural magazine. The initiative aimed at drawing the attention of the critics—and, by extension, the readers of their articles—to the need for accessibility, usability and comfort for the real diversity of users, but also to architecture’s potential multisensory richness.

Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing

This paper outlines the importance of contextual theoretical, empirical research and research by ... more This paper outlines the importance of contextual theoretical, empirical research and research by design in order to create inclusive concepts at the start of a design process. 26 master students were invited to reflect upon an old prison site in order to create a new entrance for Hasselt University representing an open university for all. Whereas many student excercises in Design for All (DfA) often focus on the needs and disabilities of people, this excercise focused on the abilities of people on site and on the opportunities of the architectural site itself. By means of linking both results, the excercise demonstrates to be very inspirational to both students and staff. The paper concludes with a categorisation in contextual analysis from an experiential as well as an architectural point of view.

comfort; home renovation; energy efficiency; universal design; lifelong living; indicators;

Sound provides information about our environment that is vital for social interaction, knowledge ... more Sound provides information about our environment that is vital for social interaction, knowledge transfer and spatial orientation. Moreover, it has profound effects on our emotional responses to the world around us. Although a more conscious use of sound holds great potential to counteract the visual dominance in architecture, so far it received relatively little attention in designing inclusive environments. In exploring this potential, our study calls in the help of people with a visual impairment; forced to rely on non-visual senses, they learn to be more attentive to auditory information. After introducing Schafer’s notion of soundscape and categorization of keynotes, signals and soundmarks, we cross analyse 22 in-depth interviews with visually impaired people, focusing on auditory qualities and constraints in the environment. The analysis yields interesting insights regarding the amount and kind of sounds heard, the different roles sounds may play, and the way the soundscape ca...

Literature, governmental and policy goals reveal a need to merge the, until now separately consid... more Literature, governmental and policy goals reveal a need to merge the, until now separately considered, concepts of Universal Design (UD) and Energy Efficiency (EE) in home renovations. Using the concept of Comfort from the perspective of homeowners, as a framework that unifies UD and EE, a list of 21 comfort indicators was developed. This paper discusses a survey undertaken with 145 homeowners to check whether these comfort indicators were indeed important from a homeowner’s perspective when building or renovating their home. It also looked at their relative importance and any possible interconnections between the indicators. In addition, the survey explored the triggers and goals of home renovations. The results show that the developed list of comfort indicators can be considered reasonably concise and complete. Comfort factors fall into 3 groups of importance with EE associated indicators located somewhere in the middle pack. This order does not significantly change between people...