Saint Gobain - Registration document 2016

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2 ONE AMBITION: TO IMPROVE THE WELL-BEING OF ALL
2. Creating great living places
32 SAINT-GOBAIN - REGISTRATION DOCUMENT 2016
COMFORT AND WELL-BEING FOR INDIVIDUAL NEEDS 2.3
COMFORT IS
SYNONYMOUS
WITH HEALTH
AND WELL-BEING
BUILDING
SCIENCE:
COMFORT
DESCRIBED
IN FIGURES
… AND WE CAN
MEASURE
THEM EASILY
MULTI-COMFORT:
WE KNOW HOW
TO IMPROVE
THESE FIGURES
air quality, etc. When developing solutions and the products
that comprise the room (ceilings, floors, walls, windows, etc.),
the first step is to understand the required comfort levels, in
terms of temperature ranges, noise levels in decibels,
percentage humidity, etc.
In any room, the well-being of the occupant depends on a
certain number of factors: temperature, humidity, sound level,
therefore the health, efficiency and productivity of end
customers.
This novel approach to the design process, underpinned by
intensive needs analysis, makes the user the central focus of
the entire innovation process. Saint-Gobain has summarized
this approach under the name “Multi-Comfort”: several
parameters, rather than just one, determine wellbeing, and
Building science quantifies comfort 2.3.1
comfort and adopting a balanced approach to them, at the
same time as developing products that reduce the user’s
energy bill and offset the CO2 emissions generated by their
manufacture in just a few months.
The primary tool for advancing along the road of
Multi-Comfort and sustainable construction is R&D.
Innovation provides Saint-Gobain with the means to make
progress, propose new standards, keep on improving the
performance of solutions and avoid banalization. The R&D
teams involved in Building science are driven by the common
challenge of understanding the parameters that delineate
combination of all these sensations that provide the sense of
wellbeing that improves quality of life. Saint-Gobain has
introduced an extensive program for better assessment and
measurement of comfort.
While comfort is an immediate concept for each individual, it
is often still difficult to quantify or grasp. Comfort appeals to
all our senses. Comfort is the visual appeal of the buildings
that we see. It lies in the ability to hear in a full restaurant on a
Saturday evening. It also means breathing filtered air in an
office block in New York or Paris-La Défense. Comfort is the
be used by thousands of Saint-Gobain employees to collect
temperature, humidity, noise, light or air quality data. The
Comfort-meter also draws on the power of Big Data to
establish standards that reflect cultural specifics and
individual preferences.
For example building on digital techniques, Saint-Gobain has
developed a tool named comfort-meter to create a direct link
between the concrete elements such as materials and
individual perceptions of comfort. The Comfort-meter is a
matchbox-sized box with sensors that send information to a
Smartphone, which then reports it via an interface. It can thus
So, if we take 68 decibels as a reasonable average sound level
for a restaurant, it can be slightly higher in a Latin country
and a little lower in a Nordic country. The lessons learned
from this intelligent tool can also be used for a meeting room
where temperature is still the first data item requiring control.
More than the tool, Saint-Gobain’s teams have integrated
experts in physiology, psychology and sociology to better
understand the individual, cultural, and subjective dimension
of comfort perception. The objective is still to define comfort
for the future and make possible the diagnostic of comfort
level of an existing building or the check the quality of the
technical improvement during a renovation.