Transition from thermal comfort to thermal pleasure: Explanation of the factors that shape thermal quality perception in the built environment

Different sensory stimuli, such as light, color, smell, sound and texture, play an important role in perceiving the quality of an environment. Heat, like other sensory stimuli, can contribute to the richness of an environment and provide a greater benefit to people. The fact that a person in addition to the thermal comfort of a particular environment can also benefit from its thermal quality, is a desirable point that can be considered by designers and architects.The idea, called "thermal pleasure", aims to make people percept the thermal quality in addition to its quantity, which has a numerical aspect. This issue can provide a basis for changing the study of thermal comfort in the field of architecture. Along with different complementary theories that try to understand thermal comfort more accurately, the concept of thermal pleasure has a qualitative look at it, considering the living environment. Since the discussion of the factors and relationships that shape thermal pleasure in the built environment has not been studied so far, it is necessary to extract these factors based on lived and real human experiences and determine the relationships between them. This study uses grounded theory, as a qualitative method, to provide a theoretical framework for the formation of thermal pleasure in the built environment. The findings of this study show that from the cooperation between thermal distinction and the messages received from the environment and the thermal resource, other factors that activate thermal pleasure are manifested from four aspects: physiological, psychological, behavioral and value. Nevertheless, according to the economic and socio-cultural and spatial context, the type of peoplechr('39')s perception of thermal quality also differs. The theoretical framework presented in this research helps to provide a stronger basis for designing future research as well as data collection following the study of thermal quality in the built environment.