New at the Department: Prof. Dr. Caroline Karmann

Caroline Karmann has been appointed to the professorship of Architecture and Intelligent Living at the Institute of Design and Building Technology. We look forward to moving the knowledge of universal and climate-conscious design forward.

Prof. Caroline Karmann

Caroline Karmann received her PhD in Architecture from UC Berkeley (USA) in 2017 and a double Master's degree in Architecture and Energy Engineering from INSA Strasbourg (FR) in 2008. Between 2008 and 2012, she worked as a consultant in sustainable building and daylighting at Transsolar in Stuttgart. She complemented this practical experience by working as a Research Fellow at Arup in London (UK) for a year in 2017, before returning to academia as a postdoctoral researcher at EPF Lausanne (CH). She taught sustainability in buildings, including daylighting, thermal comfort, and energy use, both at UC Berkeley as a teaching assistant and at EPF Lausanne as a lecturer.

Her research interests include indoor environmental quality (human comfort), visual comfort (including glare impairment and visual preferences related to outdoor views), thermal and acoustic comfort, energy optimization, and universal design.

Concept for teaching and research

Designing for the well-being and inclusion of all people is a natural component of sustainability. It unites a number of concerns that have been communicated to designers* primarily through standards specifications. This has often ignored the complexity and diversity of people's needs and the creative potential of design to meet them. My intention is to motivate students to incorporate spatial well-being, and by extension, accessible design, into the larger framework of architectural design. I want to raise awareness and deepen knowledge of how spaces can affect our comfort, perception, cognitive awareness, stress reduction, and health. In addition, digital solutions and digital-spatial interaction open up new creative possibilities to meet the needs of users*. These innovations benefit when they are well integrated into building design and tested for their robustness, usability, and long-term impact on human well-being.

Their publications are located at:
https://scholar.google.ch/citations?hl=en&user=BTnvqOUAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate

Photo: Alain Herzog