A more efficient attention recovery of workers during their break time is essential for achieving higher productivity and wellness. In recent years, the biophilic design that introduces indoor plants has become one of the solutions to these problems. This study aims to determine the impact factors and corresponding levels related to indoor planting design concerning workers’ attention recovery. Firstly, the volume ratio, layout, and leaf size of indoor plants and the corresponding levels were put forward by a focus group study with ten participants. Secondly, the orthogonal experiment method established nine virtual recovery scenarios based on characteristics extraction of staff break areas in the factory. Thirdly, eighteen participants were guided to feel fatigued by experiencing the sustained attention to response test to measure the baseline attention level of participants. Then, participants rested in the virtual scenarios. Lastly, the attention test was conducted again to observe participants’ attention recovery degree. The difference values of participants’ sensitivity, reaction times, and the number of correct responses between the two detection targets were applied to evaluate the attention recovery. Results showed that the volume ratio of indoor plants had the most significant effect on workers’ attention recovery; 3% by volume ratio, mixed floor and wall plants and floor planting with large leaves were demonstrated as the optimal indoor planting design for attention recovery.

Wooden materials can influence the human body’s thermal perception of indoor environments through visual stimuli, particularly in cold regions. Optimizing the allocation of indoor wood elements has the potential to conserve resources, reduce emissions, and enhance quality of life. This study investigated how different combinations of indoor wood elements affect human thermal perception in cold regions by using virtual reality to simulate various living room environments. The participants experienced a living room environment with different wood element configurations and reported their subjective thermal perceptions. The results revealed that the coverage and natural color of wood significantly affect thermal perception, with natural color having the most substantial influence. In contrast to conventional beliefs, increasing wood coverage does not consistently increase warmth. Notably, yellow-white wood tones evoke a greater sense of warmth than other warm tones do, challenging established views on warm tone applications. These findings offer new perspectives on the use of wood in indoor environmental design.

Since the release of the “Evaluation Standard for Green Industrial Buildings” in 2013 and “Unified Standard for Energy Efficiency Design of Industrial Buildings” in 2017, the field of industrial buildings in China has officially entered a new era of energy-saving and emission reduction. Energy consumption in severe cold area is a prominent problem due to the low temperature environment. However, studies on the combination of climate change and the diversity of skylight forms for industrial buildings are still insufficient. As a common structural element in green industrial buildings, the forms of skylights have a significant influence on building energy consumption. This paper focuses on three common skylight forms: flat skylight, trapezoidal skylight and rectangular skylight. It studies the influence of these forms on energy consumption in single-story industrial buildings situated in severe cold area. Through experimental simulation method, the influence of different skylight forms on energy consumption is comparatively studied by using Design Builder energy consumption simulation software. This method provides a scientific foundation and practical guidance for energy-saving design. The simulation results show that flat skylight has the lowest total annual building energy consumption of 2.59 million KWh, while rectangular skylight has the highest of 2.67 million KWh. The total energy consumption of buildings is made up of five components, with heating energy consumption being the highest at 71%.

It is a common phenomenon that the stairs of modern historical brick and wood buildings can not meet the existing fire protection specifications, which has become a difficulty in the repair. Based on this, this paper proposes two different repair strategies for the Chinese Baroque "Hui" shaped building in Harbin, and uses the computer fire evacuation performance simulation as the method to explore the influence of the changes of stair width, number, location and building size on the safety movement duration and number of individuals who failed to evacuate in the two repair strategies, and compares the effectiveness of common fire prevention measures. It is found that the fire development laws of the two building repair methods are similar when corre-sponding to the same stair state and building volume; When the width of stairs in-creased from 900mm to 1100mm, the evacuation effect was not significantly improved; Increasing the number of existing interior staircases from one to two increases the proportion of safely evacuated occupants from 68% to 91%.; The exterior corridor staircase shows the highest evacuation efficiency, with a single staircase sufficient to ensure the safe evacuation of all occupants; Given the same increment in total area, the increase in evacuation movement time caused by adding stories is approximately twice that caused by expanding the building footprint.; The fire prevention effect of automatic sprinkler and mechanical smoke exhaust is more obvious.