Saint Gobain - Registration document 2016

2 ONE AMBITION: TO IMPROVE THE WELL-BEING OF ALL 2. Creating great living places

2.3

COMFORT AND WELL-BEING FOR INDIVIDUAL NEEDS

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 CO 2 emissions generated by their manufacture in just a few months. 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 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 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. 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 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. 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.

BUILDING SCIENCE: COMFORT DESCRIBED IN FIGURES

COMFORT IS SYNONYMOUS WITH HEALTH AND WELL-BEING

MULTI-COMFORT: WE KNOW HOW TO IMPROVE THESE FIGURES

… AND WE CAN MEASURE THEM EASILY

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, 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 therefore the health, efficiency and productivity of end customers.

2.3.1

Building science quantifies comfort

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

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SAINT-GOBAIN - REGISTRATION DOCUMENT 2016

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