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 a surgeon might work within an operating room, and then ask yourself about what technologies and design methods can help to make that doctor’s surgical procedure better, whether that means making the surgery go faster or reducing redundancy and probability for medical error.

As in the above example, stressful demands are often placed upon the occupants who experience and function productively within your building design. And in such cases, those occupants can really feel how “spatial problems” have greater weight, as their consequences can be negative and have great impact. So how can architecture help? And what does the interactive holograph have to do with all of this?

An article I read recently entitled Amplifying Our Brain Power through Better Interactive Holographics made an interesting point when the author very simply stated that good interface design means placing less of a cognitive load on the end user. Hence, a good design simplifies a complex problem and thereby makes it easier to solve for the occupant. Here is a quote from the article that I think explains this seemingly simple, but very important, concept best:

My former colleague Don Norman at Northwestern University has contributed a great deal to our understanding of this question, in books like The Design of Everyday Things. One of my favorite examples from that book considers two different interfaces to manipulating the position of a car seat. In one interface, on a luxury American car, there is a panel of knobs and buttons almost hidden below the left side of the dashboard. To go from a state of discomfort to a new chair position requires translating your discomfort into a series of knob pulls and twists on a console of many controls with tiny labels below each. In contrast, a German luxury car had a small version of the driver’s chair in the dashboard. To move the back of your chair down, you manipulated the chair in the dashboard accordingly; to move it forward, you would move it in the direction the chair was facing, and so on. One interface placed a large cognitive load on the user to solve the discomfort problem, while the other placed minimal demands.

How to Solve for the Most Demanding of Spaces

Needless to say, a hospital operating room space can be quite complex because of the type of problems solved there. Of course, the operating room in our example from the beginning of this article should inherently be a well thought-out type of design that accounts for the …[Read Full Article]…

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 infrastructure. But you may ask yourself, just how might this “wiring” take place? And how can we prevent that communication infrastructure from being redundant both in the labor it takes to build, and in its ability to sync with dispersed sensors throughout the building.

According to the article entitled Turning HVAC into RFID, HVAC ducts are a very useful way to create a building wide antenna that can serve to help process incoming information from RFID antenna sensor networks that control various systems within a building. What this all means is that most of a building’s nervous system can go from being wired, to being wireless.

As was pointed out in the article, we have many systems within a building that work from sensors, including temperature control, fire and security systems. And while such wireless communication may prove to work very well for certain building needs, it may not quite work as well for others. But just as with any new technological ideas, there will be limitations and challenges. However, finding ways to make communication more efficient within smart buildings, is a step in the right direction.

Adding Functionality by Enhancing Your Building’s “Nervous System”

Today many buildings are rather static, depending on their own occupants to make them “operable” by physically adjusting so many of their components. Yes, buildings today have an array of …[Read Full Article]…

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 about how “control” will be established between them and their surrounding built environment. For if a building is indeed adaptive, where are the control points? Who sets the rules? And how can the resulting architectural transient behavior be seamless for both the building system and its occupant?

Well, an exciting new brain computer interface technology has been demonstrated as a new way for users to interface with their machines. And I think such technology can serve as a liaison between occupants and their buildings. Created by Emotiv Systems, this head-worn device will literally allow one to signal change by simply using one’s own thinking power. Taking only a few minutes to put on this wireless interface technology, suddenly there is so much that can potentially be done to alleviate problem points with which many of today’s interface technologies often struggle.

Within an adaptive building, such technology could greatly ease the way that a building and its occupants communicate. While privacy is indeed a concern, there is an element of control here where the wearer of this interface technology must visualize in order to create the change they wish to experience.

As you will see in the video (at the end of this article), this head-worn device may seem a bit clunky by today’s standards — but if you can imagine where such technology might take us, you will see that the rippling effects in terms of usability can be far-reaching. Not only can such a device impact the many uses for …[Read Full Article]…

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 that if you are an architect solely designing for buildings on land it would be a waste of time to think about what it would take to design them on water. But have you considered that by thinking about a design on water, you may actually come up with more innovative design solutions to many of the problems that arise when trying to design for land? For instance, in the following video you will see a hotel design concept that shows a hotel visitor’s room underwater — where you will see their bed, dresser and a couch (just like in a typical hotel room might have).

However, within this “underwater hotel”, a visitor could literally lay in bed and see a complete panorama of the underwater world floating above, as a canopy surrounding their bed. Can you imagine what it would be like to be a visitor there, falling asleep while watching fish and other sea life swim by? I know they say that fish tanks are relaxing, but what about sleeping beneath the ocean?

Kidding aside, by completely changing the type of …[Read Full Article]…

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 on the market which is described as “tunable” in that it would give people a way to control how much light and heat come in through that window. The key here is that the smart window allows for occupants to make light and heat adjustments independently from each other. So for example, an occupant would be able to let heat in while simultaneously blocking out the light. This might be good in winter months, for example. (For more of a description about how these new smart windows work, you can check out the Technology Review article here.)

What Will Make “Tunable” Design Elements Desirable?

Such new smart windows are a good sign because they are …[Read Full Article]…

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 and behavior possible for your occupants? What helps them to maintain their proper amount of focus and energy while also being creative and productive as they engage in their daily activities — even down to a physiological level.

Well, a critical and important factor which helps humans to perform optimally is none other than sleep. And where is this mostly carried out? In homes, in hospitals, in hotels and even less obvious places like boarding schools.

While achieving good design in all of these places is important in terms of helping occupants with their everyday wakeful tasks and activities, it is also important for you to know that REM sleep during the night is critically important for your occupants to achieve in order to help make not only their overall health better, but also to maximize their function and outlook for the next day like creativity, productivity and so on.

Quote from Science Daily article entitled Memory Researchers Explain Latest Findings on Improving the Mind:

“REM sleep is important for pulling together all the information we process on a daily basis and turning it into memories we can use later,” said Mednick. “This helps us to understand more about the benefits of sleep and to help people maximize their sleep schedules for optimal productivity in memory retrieval.”

How Might You Design for a Better Night’s Sleep?

When you think about adaptive architecture, you need to engage in the …[Read Full Article]…

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, I think the answer is yes.

In an article I read recently called Is a Social Crash Coming, the notion of a “hyper-connectivity” surfaces along with its ramifications in terms of human touch — or the ability for people to engage in person-to-person interactions. As an architect, I think this is a very interesting topic, especially when thinking about the role architecture has had. As an example, think of the effect of the “agora” as a Greek gathering place…it changed the dynamic of how people interrelated and behaved.

As the World Wide Web and social media make us more “present” in the minds of so many more people than ever before, I think that architectural design will need to …[Read Full Article]…

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. Such technologies, as they advance, are helping architects to bring back to the office what they observe on the field — particularly helpful if working to design a project which involves demolition, restoration or an addition.

In a recent article I read entitled Laser-Loaded Backpack Creates Instant 3D Model Interiors, researchers at UC Berkeley are said to be developing and testing a prototype for a mobile backpack of laser scanners that now can help people to very quickly document detailed aspects of a building’s interior by simply walking through it with a backpack on (this high-tech backpack will do the scanning). In the article the author also pointed out that similar to Google Earth’s GPS system which now documents street-level views of buildings and other aspects of urban landscape, mobile laser scanners are enabling us with a way to record interiors. And as was suggested in the article, perhaps just about all spaces can potentially become virtually accessible with this new streamlined and easy to use technology. (And just as we can see most any exterior street space via the Internet today, it could soon be possible to also …[Read Full Article]…

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 instantly been transported back to a certain time and place in your memory that this song seems to be unexplainably linked to? Or have you ever walked into a room that has a certain smell which instantly reminds you of an experience you had a long time ago? Or what about seeing something that triggers your memory, reminding you of a conversation you once had or a place you once visited? And in each case, did an emotion surface as a result of the sensorial memory trigger? Well, such is the research by neuroscientist Benetto Sacchetti which focuses on those possible “links” which are like narrow bridge-like connections tying together emotional memory and the senses.

If there were such a neural “link”, what would this mean for you as an architect and your building design? Would you purposefully embed certain smells in a school to encourage comforting home-like emotional ease to help foster learning? Or might you play certain sounds (or songs) while at work to help boost …[Read Full Article]…

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 engages people to experience a texture from nature in motion. And that texture closely resembles the rippling effects of water. As people walk on the dry floor where this projection is, ripples of water virtually propel from their feet as if to imply they are walking on water. Needless to say, technology (if used creatively) can connect us to new sides of nature with unexpected behaviors in unexpected places.

While such a display seems quite fun (which I think it is), there can be many practical applications for such immersive displays which can work by engaging the human body to move and react to the physics which prompt it. Just as real water has its own set of physical and behavioral properties which dictate how it responds, so too can an interactive floor projection.

For instance, such motion textures could help people recovering from injuries in hospitals by helping them to engage in therapeutic exercises and other behavioral activities that can help them to recover and heal at whatever rate works best for them — thus, a personalized guide which can encourage them, help them reconnect with their body to become stronger, healthier and more proactive. In hospitals, for instance, interactive projections might be a great way to help …[Read Full Article]…