The built environment affects our physical, mental and social well-being. Here renowned professionals from practice and academia explore the evidence from basic research as well as case studies to test this belief. They show that many elements in the built environment contribute to establishing a milieu which helps people to be healthier and have the energy to concentrate while being free to be creative. The health and well-being agenda pervades society in many different ways but we spend much of our lives in buildings, so they have an important role to play within this total picture. This demands us to embrace change and think beyond the conventional wisdom while retaining our respect for it. Creating the Productive Workplace shows how we need to balance the needs of people and the ever-increasing enabling technologies but also to take advantage of the healing powers of Nature and let them be part of environmental design. This book aims to lead to more human-centred ways of designing the built environment with deeper meaning and achieve healthier and more creative, as well as more productive places to work.

Derek Clements-Croome is Professor Emeritus in architectural engineering in the School of the Built Environment at the University of Reading, UK, and Visiting Professor at Queen Mary University of London, UK. He worked in the building design and contracting industry for several years before entering university life. He has founded and directed courses including a BSc in building environmental engineering at Loughborough University in 1970 and an inter-disciplinary EPSRC-sponsored MSc in Intelligent Buildings at Reading University in 1996. He has also worked in architecture and building engineering at the University of Bath, UK (1978-1988).

He now offers strategic advice to clients, designers and facilities managers on attaining and managing healthy and sustainable environments in buildings of all types. He researches, writes and lectures on these issues for companies, universities and wider audiences nationally and internationally in China, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Poland and Finland particularly. Some of his books have been published in Chinese and Russian. He edits and founded the Intelligent Buildings International journal first published by Taylor and Francis in 2009.

Derek is a Commissioner on air quality and biodiversity for the boroughs of Hammersmith-Fulham and for the Zero-Fifty Commission for Haringey. He is also Building Environmental Expert for the CABE arm of the Design Council and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and also the BRE Academy.

He was a member of the UK Green Building Council team that wrote the report Health and Wellbeing in Homes July 2016 and the World Green Building Council Report 2014 on Health Wellbeing and Productivity in Offices.