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The 3M Company recently announced it has joined the Well Living Lab Alliance, a global consortium of organizations supporting the advancement of knowledge about how the indoor places where people live, work and play can improve human health and well-being. 3M’s values align with the mission of the Well Living Lab: to better understand the connection between our everyday living spaces and our overall health. 3M chose to be a Sustaining Alliance member, and will work with the lab to identify further needed research and conduct studies.
The Well Living Lab, a collaboration of Delos and the Mayo Clinic, draws upon the expertise of building science and health science, and conducts human subject studies in a simulated real-world setting in which environmental variables are altered to monitor impacts on health, performance, stress and resiliency, sleep and comfort. It is the first research center devoted exclusively to this field of study. The lab has 5,500 square feet of reconfigurable space, currently set up to study occupants of apartments and open office environments. Since its inception in 2016, the lab has conducted seven studies, with more underway.
“We are committed to understanding how the connections between our everyday living spaces impact our overall health,” says Brad Graves, vice president, 3M Stationery and Office Supplies Division. “This alliance with the Well Living Lab will help us understand more deeply how to improve our consumers’ lives both at work and at home.”
Future benefits
As an alliance member, 3M will have access to emerging health insights and trends with the Well Living Lab studies, which can be leveraged in new product innovations and are based on scientific findings. 3M will also enjoy networking and knowledge sharing benefits, such as member-only educational webinars, an annual summit in conjunction with Mayo Clinic’s International Transform conference, and an annual showcase and early insights from studies.
“We look forward to the leadership and expertise that 3M will bring to advancing this movement to improve indoor environments, where most people now spend approximately 90 percent of their lives,” says Brent Bauer, M.D., Mayo Clinic, medical director of the Well Living Lab. “Alliance members bring unique perspectives, and we have a powerful community coming together.”
The Well Living Lab Alliance aims to partner with companies that want to help generate new knowledge and interact with lab experts from a wide range of scientific, medical and technical backgrounds. A listing of alliance members can be found on www.welllivinglab.com.
About the Well Living Lab
A collaboration of Delos and Mayo Clinic, the Well Living Lab is the first human-centered research facility dedicated to identifying how buildings—and everything that goes in them—impact human health and well-being. A world-class, multidisciplinary research approach guides the work of the Well Living Lab. The Well Living Lab is unique in that research is conducted on real people, in real-world settings. This is made possible by its revolutionary infrastructure, which features 7,500 square feet of sensor-rich, reconfigurable space where researchers can monitor and test products and systems on human subjects in simulated, real-world, built environments.