Associate Professor Hua Zhong
“We cannot just use a single average standard to design a building that works for different people, especially someone with a disability.” Assoc. Prof. Hua Zhong, EDI+ Fellow, London South Bank University
Written by Derek Main
Most of us spend much of our lives indoors, in rooms that engineers designed to deliver specific temperature, light, ventilation and sound levels. They decide how well the room will retain heat, calculate airflow, and determine how much daylight should reach the back of the room.
Building services engineers make many of those decisions, guided by standards intended to make buildings safe, healthy and comfortable. But when those standards are built around an average person, they can miss the considerable differences between the people who use a building.
Hua Zhong is Associate Professor of Sustainable Built Environment at London South Bank University (LSBU) and an EDI+ Fellow. She spent nearly a decade as a design consultant before moving into academia. As a Chinese woman in UK engineering, she frequently found herself in a minority.
“I was probably always the only woman in the office when I was working on industrial and construction projects,” she says. “And the other engineers were older men.”
A Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers, she has also led an EPSRC-funded Women’s Engineering Society ambassadorship focused on equality and diversity in engineering. Her EDI+ Fellowship brings these strands of her work together, looking at who enters the profession, what engineers are taught and how well the buildings they design represent the different needs of the people who use them.
Designing around an average
Building services engineering is often misunderstood as the work of installing or repairing the systems inside a building, such as heating and ventilation. Zhong is quick to correct this. “A lot of people think my colleagues and I are like plumbers, fixing the systems,” she says. “But that’s not what we do. We design the whole system around the people living and working inside the building, where most of us will spend 90 per cent of our lives. It’s about making that environment comfortable, healthy and convenient.”
That means the assumptions built into a design really matter. Temperature is a good example. Women generally feel comfortable at slightly warmer temperatures than men, a difference that can be widened by what people typically wear to work. Yet some of the thermal comfort models still used today were developed decades ago, based on studies that did not reflect the full range of people who now occupy buildings. The result can be a single temperature applied as though it works equally well for everyone.
“In an industry dominated by male engineers, it’s no surprise that the starting point for the indoor environment is not always women-friendly,” Zhong says.
For her, the relationship between engineering and the people who ultimately live and work with its decisions needs much more attention in education. “This has been missing from the teaching, the training and the research for a long time,” she says.
What the average leaves out
The limitations of designing around an average become clearer when people’s needs fall well outside the standard’s assumptions. “We cannot just use a single average standard to design a building that works for different people, especially someone with a disability,” Zhong explains.
Her research on independent living includes work with people living with dementia and their carers. That work highlights how differently people can experience the same indoor environment.
Lighting can disturb already fragile sleep, while temperature and humidity can affect comfort and wellbeing. Even an ordinary level of background noise can become deeply distressing. “People tell us the noise is unbearable,” Zhong says of those who have taken part in her workshops, “when to us it is nothing more than a conversation in the next room.”
Navigation presents another challenge. “People often lose the ability to find their way, even on a route as simple as getting from home to the supermarket,” she says. “That makes the layout of a building do far more of the work.”
And she does not see this as an issue affecting only a small group of people. “We are all getting older,” she says. “When we are young, adjusting to our surroundings costs us very little. For older people it can be genuinely hard, so the system has to meet people where they are and support them to live independently.”
For Zhong, that means involving people with lived experience from the beginning, so they can shape priorities rather than only test a finished system. But engineers who want to work this way have relatively little practical guidance to draw on. “There is no building standard, and not even a simple design guide, telling engineers and designers how to create an indoor environment that works for different kinds of people,” she says
Why the standard persists
The survey of building services educators and practitioners found broad support for making inclusive design a required professional competency. Putting that principle into practice, however, is harder.
“Following the traditional standard and applying a single setpoint across the building is quicker and easier for the engineer,” she says.
Designing for a wider range of people means knowing who will actually use a space and building systems that can respond to them. That might mean considering who is likely to use a space, including age, disability, care and activity patterns, then designing controllability and feedback around those needs. Those differences then need to be monitored and accounted for by the building’s control system. That takes more time, thought and money at the design stage than simply applying an established standard.
“We are all human, and we take the easiest route,” she says. “Get the job done quickly and move on.”
For Hua, the answer cannot rest on individual engineers choosing to do things differently. They need the knowledge, resources and confidence to consider a wider range of occupants as a routine part of their professional training.
Rethinking the route into engineering
That need to equip engineers differently also raises a wider question about how they enter the profession in the first place. At a time when building services engineering is facing skills shortages, Zhong wants to see more flexible and accessible routes into the field.
Because it is such an applied discipline, she argues that people should be able to enter through short courses and top-up training as well as conventional degree programmes, with study patterns that allow them to continue working. “They can come in one day a week, or later in the evening after work,” she says.
But widening access is not only about how people train. Zhong believes the profession is also missing out on potential recruits because many people have little idea what building services engineers actually do. “A lot of young women don’t go into this field,” she says, “because they don’t really know what building services is.” They assume it is simply part of construction and picture a career involving heavy, dirty work on site.
That bears little resemblance to Hua’s own career, which has involved computer simulation modelling, designing systems and thinking about how people experience the buildings around them. Her teaching spans sustainable technology and environmental control, architectural science and building engineering services, and intelligent and healthy buildings.
It is that relationship between buildings and the people inside them that runs through her work. Her research asks engineers to look beyond the average and think about the differences it can conceal: the resident distressed by what someone else experiences as ordinary background noise, the older person whose home has become harder to navigate, or the office worker whose thermal comfort differs from the assumptions built into the building.
“We design buildings not for the building itself, and not for the system itself, but for people,” Zhong says. “For the people living and working inside them.”