How an Interactive Holograph Can Simplify Spatial Problems for Building Designers and their Occupants

As a building designer I think it is important for you to ask yourself about how you can make certain functions within the building better — particularly when within a certain room, for instance, where its functions might be highly specialized and complex. As an example, you can think about how... [Read More]

More Efficient Building Systems Where RFID Antennas Can Communicate with HVAC Ducts

As current buildings make their way toward becoming interactive architectural environments that increasingly gain capabilities to adapt, you can begin to imagine how that kind of building’s communication system will act like a “nervous system” that travels throughout the building... [Read More]

A Headset Brain Computer Can Help Your Occupant Control Their Environment by Reading Their Thoughts (Video)

So often interactive adaptive architectural interfaces must rely on picked up cues that are either created from occupant behaviors or from different objects within an environment that move, change or transmit other real-time information. And with these types of cues comes concern from building occupants... [Read More]

Boost Creativity for an Innovative Design By Asking “What If” (Video)

So much of our time as architects is spent thinking and designing for projects that live on land, but what about architecture that lives on water? What if you had to design a human dwelling that is not only near the water, but actually in it? Change a Major Variable…Like the Site One would think... [Read More]

Smart Windows Mark the Path Toward the “Tunable” Smart Building

New technologies are emerging like smart windows that are not only making it more energy efficient and cheaper for occupants to run their smart building systems during different seasons of the year, but are providing a way to make occupants feel more comfortable as well. There is a new smart window... [Read More]

Achieve Better Home and Hospital Design by Focusing on Occupant Sleep

When it comes to architectural design, most emphasis is placed on what happens within buildings while occupants are awake, active and being productive as they engage in their wide range of daily human behaviors. But as an architect, you must step back and ask yourself what makes all of this activity... [Read More]

The Rising Role of the Building System Aimed at Using Social Media

As the World Wide Web and social media encourage more and more digital and virtual social interactions, will the role of the architectural building system have a new place in contributing to or detracting from the way we humans interact with each other? With so so many people now using social media,... [Read More]

Using Mobile Laser Scanners to Create a Detailed Architectural Visualization on the Fly (Video)

New technologies like mobile laser scanners are making it easier to capture greater detail of real-life 3D space in a fraction of the time it would normally take to mentally deconstruct, document and virtually render those spaces for either architectural contract documents or for an architectural visualization.... [Read More]

Your Building Design Can Trigger Profound Occupant Emotional Memory

There is very interesting research going on right now which is indicating that there could be neural connections in the brain “between the senses (hence, sensorial stimuli) and intense memories”. (1) Instinctively, do you this such connections exist? Have you ever listened to a song and... [Read More]

Creative Interactive Floor Projection Brings Nature Indoors in New Ways

I think that as we progress into the future, new technologies should help us reconnect with nature in entirely new ways — rather than as a divide by which we further separate from it. For this reason, I find it quite interesting to have come across an interactive floor projection design which... [Read More]

Augmented Reality Give Your Building Materials New Behaviors

Who would have thought that a concrete block could be rendered invisible? Well, with the use of augmented reality technologies, just that has been achieved. By allowing sensing technologies which are capable of face-detection to act as an intermediary, the invisible concrete block system is able to... [Read More]

From Interactive Billboards to Adaptive Building Surfaces

When you walk through a building like a mall or an airport where there is a lot of signage, and often much of that signage is advertising, you might either feel somewhat interrupted as you travel to your destination, or you might feel helped by finding a “just-in-time” building directory,... [Read More]

Architectural Design Usability For Everyone

As an architect, is important for you to understand your occupants as more than just and “occupant load”, and really begin to understand the demographics of who will be using your building and why — and most importantly what do they want to achieve when within it. This is important... [Read More]

Does Augmented Reality Technology Change Your Building for Better or For Worse?

As people travel through the world today, they experience many dimensions to the spaces they encounter. Whether within a building, or when exploring a city, people are navigating with the help of things like cars, handheld instruments like smart phones, cameras, books or various map-like devices. However,... [Read More]

Enhancing Occupant Experience with 3D Mobile Augmented Reality (Video)

It is undeniable that mobile phones with operating systems that get updated frequently are becoming more widespread globally. In fact, phones like the iPhone are helping people with a variety of tasks ranging from keeping track of their health and finances, all the way to realizing new types of face-to-face... [Read More]

“Just-in-Time” Interactive Surface Design Can Help Your Building (Video)

Buildings are much more than a surrounding envelope which merely exists in a state separated from its occupants and their objects and tools. Instead, buildings are part of the landscape which helps occupants to live better. And now, with more sensory technologies, architecture can connect anew with... [Read More]

Can Architecture Material Elicit Emotion through It’s Composition?

Now that science is advancing in a way that impacts building innovation from an architecture material standpoint, you as an architect should look to bridge the gap between selecting materials and designing materials to be used in your building designs. After all, this is a great way to increase your... [Read More]

Clothing as a Bridge Between Human Process and Architecture

Just imagine wearing clothes that monitor your body’s processes throughout the day. Well, in a recent issue of Scientific American it was found that MIT researchers have come up with a piezoelectric fiber that can record and produce sound. So, what does this mean for architecture and why would... [Read More]

How Computer Games Can Change the World One Building Design at a Time (Video)

I think it is interesting for you as an architect to take a look at another dimension of something you use everyday — the computer. More specifically, think of how you typically work to design your own visualizations of a building design for the future. Perhaps you start with real world challenges... [Read More]

How Flyfire is bringing Lighting Design into a Whole New Realm (Video)

The work going on over at the SENSEable City Lab at MIT will really make you think. You might start by simply asking yourself what would happen if little omni lights (think stars in the sky, but much much closer) could move around responsively and dynamically through space — and move transiently... [Read More]

How Kinetic Architecture Can Redefine Folding Space through Variation

With the redefinition of flexible space into what is now being called kinetic architecture, you as an architect need to go beyond movement to really think about what growth, expansion and contraction has the power to do. Furthermore, we can begin to bring forward what it might mean for architectural... [Read More]

How the Sense of Touch Can Drive Occupant Decision-Making

In a recent Boston Globe article entitled Researchers Say Sense of Touch Guides Impressions, it was found that the sense of touch really is an important factor when it comes to perception. As you may already infer, we all seem to use an initial impression of something to form a judgment — which,... [Read More]

Adaptation and Environment: When Architecture Shapes Us Through Sound (Video)

When taking a closer look at the relationship between music and the theater in which it is played, the composer becomes a pivotal link between the two that provides some intriguing insight into ways that architecture shapes its occupants. As architects, we like to think that we shape architecture —... [Read More]

The Power of Scent for Architectural Design

I came across an interesting article recently entitled Scent as Design. In it, the author discusses topics that were brought up during a recent symposium that was held to promote thought on the implications of using scent in design. To no surprise, it was shared that within today’s “modern... [Read More]

Start a Quality Control Design Test of Your Building After It’s Built

Often in architectural design (and as with any business) there is a wide variety of modeling, testing, and planning to ensure that the final project (or product) will make its way into the real world with great success. As architects, I know that there are a wide variety of things we do to help us... [Read More]

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