A session held at the 9th International Conference and Exhibition Healthy Buildings 2009 in Syracuse (NY), attracted around 50 persons from different countries all over the world. The main question discussed was: How to make the end user aware of IAQ?
There was a common agreement that education and awareness is an essential action for improving indoor air quality. Probably the best approach would involve education of children at school. They are the future and they will teach their parents. This is seen as appropriate for the awareness of energy use, e.g. use of lighting. If children at school learn to turn off the light when they leave a room, they will teach their parents at home. It is also easier to teach children than their parents from a practical point of view (parents will not go to educational classes in general). Linking indoor air quality (IAQ) to sustainability (reduction of CO2) could be an effective approach. In fact it was mentioned by several attendants, that on a small scale some programmes are being trialled for children at school.
At political level (EU) IAQ is being recognized as a public health issue. Therefore, according to some of the attendants, we should also follow the way of standardization at the European or even global level, forcing the stakeholders of the built environment to follow ‘the rules’. This would require concise information from research, presented to the community in a ‘digestible’ way. This opinion was not shared by everyone. Information should not be over-simplified in an attempt to make it easy to understand, because this can make the information useless. This could be symptomatic of us not yet knowing enough to make that transition to a ‘common knowledge’: at a general (putting things together) or even at a detailed level. Simplicity is different from simple. Two opinions could be extracted from the discussion:
- The knowledge is in place but needs to be translated into tools that can effectively reach the intended audience(s) and enable them to put science into action. The interpretation of that knowledge should be interdisciplinary, in order to incorporate results from different sciences and approaches, to give a better and more complete picture of the present knowledge
- Detailed knowledge and new issues are emerging that need more R&D before it can be communicated to the public. There is also a need for more broad conclusions linked to a wider context.