International Journal of

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Today Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a powerful development method whit a wide range of applications to translate customers’ needs into technical requirements for achieving customer satisfaction. The current study demonstrated a QFD analysis to improve school furniture design in Tehran as the baseline of Iran. Accordingly, we extended the widely used QFD method into a complex set of customer demands about the school furniture and showed the step-by-step application of QFD that focused on the firs matrix known as House of Quality matrix. The study started by identifying the problem statement, specifying the objectives and designing the scopes of school furniture. 160 students recruited from three high schools located in different areas of Tehran participated in our study. Student’s requirements were collected and translated into the technical requirements using QFD method. Data gathering was carried out through survey, questionnaire distribution and structured interview. Subsequently, the collected data was analysed to find the best solutions for the problems. Obtained results from House of Quality matrix evaluation, were used to provide suggestions and solutions to reduce the problems. The present case study shows that QFD method can help demonstrators to ascertain inter relationship between operation requirements and measures of performance.
 

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School environments are connected to children perceptions and emotions. The goal of this research is to explore children subjective perceptions of their school environment using “Q-sort methodology” as a unique method for environmental studies. This paper makes two main contributions. First, the research provides a study design to identify children’s perceptions of school environment that propose new information about what children prefer and can be used in the design of school spaces by designers. Second, it evaluates Q-sort methodology for gathering data directly from children concerning about their perceptions and preferences to clarify their perspectives of  the environment based on these objectives. The questions that this paper addresses are: 1- What environmental components in schools do children percieve positively and prefer? And, 2- How can research with children about their place perceptions using Q-sort? According to the purpose of the study, the respondents included 30 children (boys) from the first and second grade of two private primary schools in Kerman. The research, based on q-sort methodology, used interview as a tool for collecting data and discourse analysis for analyzing the data, and exploring the children’s perspectives. The study revealed that children interpreted spaces psychologically and had positive perceptions of and preferences for informal, personal, hiding, cozy, home-like and playground spaces and so on, likely due to affording their psychosocial needs.  The result shows that future school designs should explore strategies that use connections of physical and psychosocial characteristics of child's environments to foster positive experience and perceptions.

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Achievement of thermal comfort in the built environment is one of the human life needs. Many studies have already explored the issues around human comfort in relation to the surrounding thermal environment. However, most of these studies used quantitative methods that fall into the positivist paradigm. Despite the conducive results obtained, many aspects of the thermal comfort are neglected as the nature of comfort is directly associated with the human dimension. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt a different approach such as qualitative and mixed methods to better understand the underlying mechanisms of thermal comfort concept and its achievement. These methods could reveal other aspects of human comfort that have not been considered. However, the application of these methods requires fundamental knowledge of ontology and epistemology. Therefore, this paper reviewed and compared the dynamics of the application of the paradigms in thermal comfort studies and their methodologies. Analytical findings among the methods of studying thermal comfort showed that only quantitative studies were not sufficient to create the applied knowledge in this vein. As this is a human-based field, its methodology should be first selected and then designed in the right way respecting the context where a study is going to be carried out. In this process, qualitative studies can determine contributing factors, then quantitative studies can find the relationships between these factors.