Dive summary:

• First we heated buildings evenly to keep people comfortable, and then we figured out how to keep a room comfortable, and now scientists at MIT are working with a technology to saved energy by keeping just one person in their chosen climate zone.
• The technique would use infrared beams to keep a person at a selected temperature rather than, for example, heating a whole room for the comfort of the only individual in it, and they have experimented with models that kept people comfortable in front of a major university building even in March in Cambridge, Mass.
• One aspect of climate control that hasn't been brought into the experimentation yet, however, is the opposite challenge – keeping one person at a time cool in summer.

From the article:

"What we’re trying to do with the lab is explore different futures," [Carlo] Ratti says. If you reverse-engineer the future – picture it as a place where hyper-localized climate control is actually commonplace – then how would you get there? ...