Jonathan Bean, PhD, understands processes of market transformation in the building industry through an immersive study of high performance building. His TEDx talk Demand Less describes the potential of high-performance building to reduce carbon emissions. Bean has served as the faculty lead for thirteen finalist teams in the Race to Zero and Solar Decathlon Design Challenge competitions. In 2022, his students’ design for an affordable housing building incorporating the innovative SunBlock distributed district energy system concept was recognized with the Commercial Grand Prize.
Bean is a PHIUS Certified Passive House Consultant and serves on the board of the Passive House Alliance US. Bean is also the scholarship chair for the Society of Building Science Educators.
A second stream of Bean’s research spans the fields of consumer research, human-computer interaction, architecture, and design with a focus on taste and consumption. Bean has received grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Institute for Transportation and Communities, and others. Bean writes the Consuming Tech column for ACM Interactions magazine and his work on IKEA hacking was featured on an episode of the 99% Invisible podcast.
In 2013, Bean and Concordia University Montréal marketing professor Zeynep Arsel, Ph.D. published a Journal of Consumer Research article that built on theories of practice to develop the concept of the taste regime, which is defined as “a discursively constructed normative system that orchestrates practice in an aesthetically oriented culture of consumption.” The article has been cited over 400 times and has established taste as a key area of inquiry in Consumer Culture Theory. Bean and Arsel co-edited the 2018 Routledge book Taste, Consumption and Markets.
Bean is co-director of the Institute for Energy Solutions, affiliated with the Arizona Institute for Resilience.
