Are comfort expectations of building occupants too high?

The recent Building Research Information special issue titled 'Comfort in a Lower Carbon Society' has taken up, with subtlety and diversity, prospects for reducing the energy consumed in creating thermal comfort. As this excellent collection of papers shows, comfort quickly becomes 'about nearly everything', so the interdisciplinary discussions such as provided by the special issue are critical to understanding how comfort expectations and comfort provision might change. The following commentary draws out two lines of enquiry from this collection, both relating to everyday experiences of comfort and its acquisition. The first line explores evidence that people are not as thermally comfortable in their places of work as design values specify and as theory assumes. This leads to renewed questions about theory versus design, adaptation, relationships of thermal to other kinds of comfort, and expectations of workers as well as by them. More speculatively, it reflects briefly on how comfort works outside the workplace, in the car and finally at home. The second line explores the theme of expectations about proper conduct, energy-wise and otherwise, in an era of intensified climate change communications and conservation campaigns.