In this study, changes in resident-led house management from the post-World War II period to the present are traced, with a focus on residents’ management behaviors and related components, with the aim of informing future management method. To this end, articles on housing and housework published in KURASHI NO TECHO from 1948 to 2023 were reviewed and analyzed.
Although resident-provided, consumer-oriented information continues to be shared, the purpose of house management has changed over time, with a tendency for its scope and focus to become narrower and more limited. To achieve sustainable home management that enables long-term use, it is essential not only to implement seismic retrofitting and renovations for elderly residents and to maintain daily routines that ensure comfort, but also to foster residents’ awareness of home management and to develop and implement a social system through which they can access appropriate information to support the ongoing management of their homes.
This study investigated the usefulness of educational materials (hereafter referred to as ‘the calendar’) with information on desirable eating habits at the top of the calendar for local residents in Japan. We developed the calendar that could be used between January and December 2023. We distributed the calendar in December 2022 to all households (1,358 households) belonging to the D Residents’ Association, C District, B City. A questionnaire concerning the calendar was distributed between December 2023 and January 2024.
The calendar-using proportion of the group was 76.8%, and 72.8% of respondents thought that the calendar information was useful for their own health promotion. In terms of willingness to improve eating habits, the proportion of participants with a high willingness to improve eating habits was significantly higher in the calendar use group.
Participants with a high willingness to improve eating habits tended to have higher calendar impact scores than those with low willingness to improve eating habits, suggesting that the provision of information on healthy eating habits using the calendar may have influenced awareness of eating habits and behavioral change.
To investigate the psychological effects of clothing color on people’s sense of warmth, a questionnaire survey was conducted. Participants were presented with T-shirt-shaped fabrics in different colors. The results demonstrated that people had a higher sense of warmth towards warm colors, such as red and yellow, and also felt a higher sense of warmth towards darker shades within the same color family. The fabrics were subsequently irradiated with light using a reflex lamp and their temperature changes were measured. The results indicated that among the different hues, the highest reach temperature of dark-colored fabrics was higher than that of light-colored fabrics, due to light absorption. However, the temperature increase associated with light irradiation did not necessarily correspond to the psychological sense of warmth. For example, the highest reach temperature for blue fabrics, a cold color, was higher than that for yellow fabrics, a warm color. Furthermore, spectral analysis of transmitted and reflected light was performed on these fabrics. The results showed a strong correlation between the sum of solar transmittance and solar reflectance in a wavelength region, including the near-infrared region, and the highest reach temperature measured by the light irradiation from a reflex lamp. In other words, the higher the proportion of light absorption by the fabric, including near-infrared light, the more easily its temperature increased.