Human beings evolved outside in nature, exposed to the constantly changing weather. Today, however, many people spend most of their lives in unchanging, climate controlled interiors.

Oregon BEST member faculty and University of Oregon professor of architecture Kevin Nute has been exploring ways to retrofit existing buildings to help bring aspects of the changing natural world back into our living and working environments, with the goal of improving health, morale, and productivity.

While light shelves are common features on many buildings as a means of reducing window glare and increasing interior daylighting, Nute and one of his graduate students, Aaron Weiss, have taken this proven environmental control device to a new place – as a tool for transferring movement found outside in nature into building interiors. They have developed a prototype water light shelf consisting of a tinted Plexiglas tray that that can be flooded with water to create a shallow rectangular pool that sits outside a window. When the sun hits the water surface, moving wave patterns created by air movement are transmitted to the floor and ceiling inside.

“As human beings, we need this kind of variation as well as connections to nature because they help keep us alert and engaged,” Nute says.

Research shows that exposure to nature, such as taking a brisk walk or opening a window for fresh air, boosts productivity and promotes health. But many people work in buildings with limited access to the outdoors. In fact, simply seeing nature through a window can be frustrating if we cannot interact with it, Nute says.

“So we’re bringing the natural animation of the weather to people indoors,” says Nute, who was a research fellow and associate professor of architecture at two Japanese national universities prior to joining the University of Oregon. “The philosophy behind this is to reconfigure the building envelope to transmit more of the natural change happening in the world we left behind outside to the indoor environments where we now spend most of our time.”

The research has two primary objectives: reducing stress and improving sustained attention. Nute’s team wanted to know if exposure to natural patterns indoors had a calming effect and improved concentration.

Initial results from controlled experiments in collaboration with the University of Oregon Dept. of Psychology indicate a definite calming effect. Nute's team also wants to know if the naturally animated ceiling patterns improve concentration by helping to keep people alert without being consciously distracting. With this in mind, they have installed working prototypes of the water light shelves on three buildings in Eugene, including medical and dental waiting rooms, where occupants are often under-occupied and anxious.

“Both our patients and the people who work here really like the animated light effect,” says Douglas Austin, MD, of the Women’s Care Obstetrics and Gynecology Clinic in Eugene, one of the locations where the prototypes are installed. “They think it is beautiful and interesting, and most people say it makes them feel calmer. The only thing is that many patients would like it to be bigger.”

The technology is very simple, which is at the heart of Nute’s approach to building design, a result of his experience with Asian architecture.

“This is very low tech, nothing more than a tray of water,” Nute says. “We’re trying to have the greatest effect on the largest number of buildings and people by using the simplest means possible.”

By keeping the technology simple but making its effects visually engaging, Nute and his team hope to encourage people to install the shelves on existing buildings. “We're deliberately targeting the existing building stock and ordinary building occupants,” he says. “If sustainable design focuses only on capital-intense new construction, it can’t hope to have a significant positive effect in time.”

In addition to its psychological impacts, the water light shelf, which offers all the benefits of a standard light shelf, reduces energy use in buildings in the following ways:

• shading, which reduces window glare and heat gain
• improved interior daylighting, which reduces the need to use electric lights and the associated cooling loads they generate
• evaporative cooling in conjunction with opening windows

"We’ve learned to keep the weather out of our buildings so effectively that we’ve also lost two important requirements for our well being in the process: nature and change,” Nute says. “We're just trying to redress that balance in ways that also help to sustain environment."

Nute and his colleagues are now looking for external investors to help turn the water light shelf into a commercial green building product that can be retrofitted to a wide range of existing buildings.