Adaptive Design:

The Dialogue Between Building and Occupant

Adaptive architecture will embody behaviors that respond to human and environmental interactions. It is with this transience that architectural space will more fully interact — or “converse” with its occupants, in grand part due to converging architectural technology.

With adaptive design, architecture will take on “motion” in new ways. A new type of “dialogue” between a building and its user will ask new things of its occupants, while feeding back dynamic and real-time sensorial stimuli.

Instead of having somewhat truncated conversations as you can experience with present-day interactive installations, the adaptive architecture of tomorrow will be able to engage in a dialogue where “feedback from the environment” takes on new meanings.

Today’s Sneak-Peeks

In their book entitled Interactive Architecture (my affiliate link), Miles Kemp and Michael Fox explore just how these adaptive environments could be designed and assembled.

Clearly showing how it will be possible to “construct” adaptive design spaces, they explain how “miniature robots, new material compositions, molecular geometries, robotic prototyping, atypical geometries and shape shifting-architectures” will have a profound effect on …[Read Full Article]…

One of the most profound and informative senses that we have is our sense of touch. This sense informs so much of the way we “see” the world around us. Some have even said that touch is the greatest of all the senses.

It is interesting to think that in some way all of our other senses engage in some form of “touch” as we experience the things which make up our environments. Thus, as we move through architectural spaces, we touch what we perceive and we perceive what we touch — we extract it, interpret it and make meaning of it in our memory and through learning. You can say that “touch” helps us to understand.

Again, touch can involve all of the senses in some way. When you touch something it has been said that you can “feel” it. One could suppose that this means that you completely take it in through the senses — to cognitively and emotionally form a perception and then an impression.

Interactivity Fosters a “Touch” Mindset

With the advancement of interactive design, architecture is becoming more responsive and ultimately adaptive. Your occupants will be paying a different kind of attention to your designs as it begins to …[Read Full Article]…

CAPTURING FORM

A recent exhibit at Vienna’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Gallery is titled Transitory Objects where architectural forms unleashed a redefined way of perceiving architecture. Adaptive architecture can easily stem from such displays where the form is actually a moment “captured” during its dynamic process of mutation.

This results in merging both science and art to yield what we might later coin as the science of architecture. Here is a great excerpt about the Transitory Objects exhibit:

Ritchie, Oxman, Roche, and their colleagues split deeply from the finite, permanent, and utilitarian tradition of architecture. Not to say their end products are not useful or habitable. In fact, their structures are arguably better suited to the constantly morphing, impermanent, and aesthetically driven needs and desires of modern society. Rather than working with an end product or useful context in mind, they focus on the process of producing a structure that follows certain laws or principles. These resulting objects rise from computational models and algorithms whose inputs are being drawn from or at least inspired by some of the most boundary-pushing and abstract ideas in science, like quantum physics or the multiverse theory. (1)

When you think about architecture from this light, it really does unleash …[Read Full Article]…

HEIGHTENING ARCHITECTURE’S POTENTIAL

There is no question that the design evolution of technology is skyrocketing – and having profound effects on architecture. As technology grows in processing power, it also shrinks in size, allowing for more complex uses where technology can be embedded in objects (and smart environments). Consequently, interactions between humans and technology are becoming evermore complex, and at the heart of such interactions may be the notion of rule-based systems — where sensors and actuators communicate according to rules that allow an environmental system to carry out goal-based behaviors.

HOW WILL BUILDINGS LEARN?

But, is this the only way to build smart environments in the future? In a recent article entitled The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine, the author Ray Kurzweil describes how machines are gaining speed in their ability to download complex patterns. He states that “computing technology is …[Read Full Article]…

What if interactive architecture could do more than just react to its occupants? What if architecture was based on rules that could promote designated functions? In this light, architecture would be motivational and goal-oriented. Hospitals; for instance, would actually help patients to heal — instead of being cold and sterile, like so many hospitals we find today. 

Adaptable architecture could help occupants have better experiences within buildings. For instance, within hospitals a rule-based architecture could help patients to do the following:

• understand their treatment
• reduce stress
• decrease pain
• engage in healing behavior

Hospital rooms could tailor their interactions toward certain illnesses, recovery and patient types. In addition, adaptive architecture could help the medical staff do a better job, making less medical errors. Of course, patient control and choice is important — and adaptive architecture should make provisions for both as it promotes functions within.

Just as the brain changes itself by learning, so too must interactive architecture. By learning from feedback, this type of architecture can learn to adapt to occupant needs in real-time. As it interacts, it learns – adapting and evolving as occupant need deem necessary.

When the brain changes by learning, this is called neuroplasticity. By optimizing functionality, the brain’s goal is to always make itself more useful. Can you imagine how this might apply to interactive architecture?

By embedding feedback into interactive architecture the system may begin to adapt, working toward rule-based system goals. Such goals can be occupant-centered — and from its many interactions with occupants, architectural sensory agents may begin to decipher patterns. From such feedback the architecture can regulate itself and grow by learning.

Interactive architecture can do more that respond to human behavior. With feedback, it can begin to actually adapt – evolving in its communication and; therefore, ability to help occupants.