DaylightGuide: A tool for personalized daylight recommendations for the home office

The COVID-19 pandemic elicited a massive shift towards working from home, and employees continue to spend part of their workweek in the home office. This development has put a spotlight on the home office environment, especially regarding the environmental quality of the home office design and how this influences the employee’s health and well-being. An important factor contributing to the indoor environmental quality is light. Light not only enables us to see the environment around us and perform visual tasks effectively, but it also has profound effects on our physical and mental health and well-being. Besides this, light also plays a crucial role in setting the atmosphere of a space and it can impact how we feel. Adequate lighting conditions ensure good visual performance and visual comfort, and also play a vital role in regulating our biological clock, thereby affecting our sleep-wake cycles and general well-being. Thus, adequate lighting is important to foster employee productivity, satisfaction, health, and well-being. The importance of lighting is reflected in the fact that (inter)national standards guide the lighting design in buildings in general, and at workplaces such as offices in specific.
Despite the extensive body of knowledge on the importance of adequate lighting and the existence of lighting standards, there is a design and knowledge gap: at present, there are no official standards guiding the lighting design in home offices. Moreover, the lighting in home offices is nearly always designed by the home office worker, rather than a lighting consultant or designer. As such, the question is whether the lighting design in home offices is adequate to support the execution of office tasks, and contribute to employee health and well-being.
As a solution to this problem, DaylightGuide was created. This is a tool that provides daylight guidance to people who work from home. DaylightGuide was created by first focusing on examining the current state of home office design in The Netherlands, especially with respect to lighting.
To do so, an extensive questionnaire study was conducted that provided qualitative insights on (day)light in home offices, as well as daylight characteristics, such as the availability of windows.
Second, based on the insights gained from the questionnaire study, daylight simulations were conducted that shed light on the daylight availability in home offices in a quantitative manner.
Through these two steps, a set of adjustments that people can make to their home office was identified, to alter their daylight exposure for the purposes of stimulating their biological clock, minimizing visual discomfort, and using daylight as a means to provide enough light on their work station to perform their office tasks.
This Engineering Doctorate project is a first step towards ensuring that anyone working from home has the tools to create a home office environment that has desirable daylighting conditions based on their individual home office setup and personal preferences. Moreover, this is a first step toward creating functional home work spaces that simultaneously promote well-being.