As a person works to achieve their goal, they often will encounter milestones along the way. And at these milestones it becomes important for them to assess how they are doing. Are they behind where they should be at a certain point? Are they ahead? And what happens as a result of where they are?

Well, what if an environment could pick up on cues about where an occupant is in relation to their goal? Perhaps it could use some just in time design interventions to help motivate and educate occupants toward their goal. This type of designing might take advantage of what I wrote about in my last post on adaptive architecture. That is, the architecture could feedback information to its occupant to help them achieve their goals.

Such an architecture would take advantage of aspects like teaching and rewarding occupants at just the right moments. Akin to a video game that rewards you to continue onto the next level — this type of adaptive architecture differs in that it aims to ease the obstacles and challenges while motivating and teaching its occupant.

Some examples of this type of reward-system architecture could be an environment that proactively helps occupants lose weight, engage in healthier habits, or work more productively. You see, each of these goals can be broken down into milestones, and each of the milestones can be used as points in time during which the environment can offer feedback on where an occupant is in their process, on how to improve for their next steps, and it can offer feedback in the form of a reward — which can serve as powerful motivation.

So, your objective as a designer isn’t to reward your occupants in meaningless ways, but to find rewards for them that are meaningful for them and their way of life…for their goals and objectives. You can make your environment feedback to its occupants in the form of signage, digital media installations, beautifully composed architectural elements, or even through their mobile devices. Don’t forget that environments are becoming more able to communicate with occupants through objects and appliances found within the environment.

Whatever the case, think about reward for your occupants as you design. How will you reward them? When will you reward them? And for what will you reward them? Think about elements that fit into their daily narrative, and also remember that you can use techniques like surprise, beauty, and knowedge to enhance their experience and propel occupants toward their goals.

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

If a building can provide real-time feedback to assist with promoting positive behaviors, do you think it would be a good idea to design such a building? You see, the implications to designing such a building are many. For instance, notions of privacy, control, and determining what positive behaviors to promote all feed into what might make such a building challenging to build.

Nevertheless, we can already see feedback being used to promote behaviors during regular daily life. For example, your car lets you know how fast you’re going, how much gas you have left, and whether or not you’ve forgotten to put your seatbelt on. In the case of the car, its feedback mechanisms target letting you know how to engage in positive behaviors that keep you and your car safe. Plus, the issues of privacy and control are all dealt with seamlessly.

For a building that is adaptive in its design, it could sense aspects like occupant mood and behavior, from which it could detect patterns — to determine desired outcomes, goals, and/or experiences seeked out by occupants. And in doing so, it could feedback to its occupants with important and timely information to help trigger positive behaviors.

Such positive behaviors could be to exercise more, to watch less tv, to eat healthier, to go to bed earlier for a better night’s sleep, or to become more productive by working smarter and multi-tasking less. Really, the behaviors that are deemed positive and worthy of being an occupant goal might all be embedded within the adaptive building’s fabric. Thus, what the building feedsback via its environmental stimuli would target helping occupants achieve such positive behaviors to reach their goals.

So, to answer the initial question which this article began with: Can Building feedback help to increase positive occupant behaviors? I think that if designed well, then the answer is yes. However, much care should be given to ensure that the building is targeting what the occupant wants to achieve, along with any predetermined safety measures as determined by the architect.

In the end, such an adaptive building could really help to improve occupang lifestyle, health, and happiness. The key is to make certain that the building’s feedback is in fact helping them positively. If designed well, I think that there is much that could be accomplished with such an architecture.

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: seier+seier | Flickr

Now, in the Journal of Applied Physics, researchers at Arizona State University have created a material that may be able to not only sense damage in structural materials, such as cracking in a fiber-reinforced composite, but to even heal it. The aim of developing “autonomous adaptive structures” is to mimic the ability of biological systems such as bone to sense the presence of damage, halt its progression, and regenerate itself.

-Science Daily (reprinted with adaptations from American Institute of Physics materials.

After reading the above quote, you may start to more truly understand what smart materials, and more specifically adaptive materials, are becoming capable of doing. Not only would such innovations help the building industry with the maintenance of buildings, and therefore also their safety, but they would also carve a path toward further developments leading to more sophisticated adaptive environments.

To see a quick example of how an adaptive material might work in terms of shape memory behavior, take a look at the following video of a polymer that regains its original shape once exposed over a certain temperature of its heat threshold —

While the above video may look simple enough, I invite you to consider what might develop in the future as a result of such adaptive materials as they evolve into our future environments.

Suppose for a moment that wall systems could expand and contract, pulling from different shape memories, and reacting to different stimuli that trigger their adaptation responses. Imagine that many of the functions within a building that are now static and locked in place, in the future could become dynamic — moving to wherever they are needed, seamlessly and easily because of their “self-healing” and “morphing” nature.

When combining adaptive materials with other forward thinking ideas such as the inherent ability of smart materials to take on newfound properties such as greater strength, increased flexibility, self-cleaning and a great variety of other transient behaviors — adaptive materials will most certainly be an interesting topic to keep an eye on.

But for now, I encourage you to watch this next video entitled the “Living Kitchen”. And as you watch, keep an open mind to transcend modern day limitations and begin to think more creatively about what architecture and its adaptive installations will be able to do to improve human lifestyle in the future.

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: mindfrieze | Flickr

Environment and behavior are linked. And since research is showing that this is the case, I think you as an architect should be aware of how your designs may spark certain behaviors in your building occupant. For instance, color has been said to impact mood, which in turn, impacts behavior. However, color is just one variable in a wide range of factors about architectural design that affect a person’s behavior.

But, can architecture do more than just create a behavior? What about changing a behavior?

There are times when a person needs to change a behavior, such as when striving to lose weight, stop smoking, eat healthier or watch less television. (You get the idea.) Well, researchers that are part of Stanford University’s Persuasive Tech Lab put together a succinct slideshow about the Top 10 Mistakes in Behavior Change — and if you think about each of the slide topics they present (shown below), you may start to imagine how an architectural environment can help its occupants to change behaviors they want to change.

Before I present you with the slideshow, I would like to point out a few things about designing an architecture that can become part of supporting a behavioral change for its occupant. Generally speaking, as an architect you should learn (in depth) about the narrative that your building occupant is experiencing with regard to their old habit, and the narrative of the journey and maintenance of their new habit. In short, understand their journey — where they are, where they want to go, and the steps in between to get them there.

Next, you need to find milestones that can serve as goals. When a goal is reached, a reward may be given. And of course, positive encouragement is important to give along the way as well. For some, visual metrics of progress or an abstract form of “coaching” can work, particularly just before your occupant makes certain decisions because these are great times to indicate progress to keep up good work, or promote incentives. These can take on the form of “triggers” — a term you will see in the slideshow at the end of this article.

In essence, know that when you design an architectural environment, you are creating the spaces that people spend most of their time in. And you must align those spaces with how your occupants intend to grow as a person — whether it is their home, their office or their school.

Know that what you design, your buildings’ elements can act as triggers, whether they are helpful or not. Thus, your goal should be to align the triggers that are inherent to your design to help your occupants. Be thoughtful about it.

So, if your building occupant lives within a home that you designed, perhaps the kitchen helps them to eat healthier by making their cooking and dining experience unique to their needs, or perhaps they can exercise more because there are subtle triggers within their environment’s design to stop watching so much television all evening. Additionally, when you factor in much of what interactive technologies can do today within a household… time-based triggers and rewards for goals reached become priceless as they encourage those steps toward wanted behavioral change.

The following is the slideshow put together by the Stanford University Persuasive Tech Lab. Think about how these insights into behavior change might help you design better architectural environments for your building occupants.

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

What if upon entering your building, you could see actual signals being sent to you from your occupants about how they feel while experiencing your building design? Would you design differently if you knew when within your building design they felt happy? Or in awe? Or stressed?

Now that technologies like the new Q Sensor (a type of bio sensor which tracks the stress levels of a person that is wearing it) are coming into play — we are in a time that is providing some very interesting opportunities for the architectural profession. For instance, you may be able to get more detailed information on what factors affect your occupant most while they take the journey through your building designs. You could potentially get to the bottom of what and why particular elements within your built space usually trigger certain reactions in your occupants. And, you could use that information to inform your design as it responds adaptively in real-time, or you could use it toward evolving your own body of architectural design works as you take what you’ve discovered into your future projects.

If used correctly to uncover emotional triggers, such a wearable bio sensor could give you quite fascinating information about your occupants likes and dislikes. And by learning from all of those occupants that are wearing these wrist worn sensors, your building may be able to adapt and modify itself to respond to the way in which they are reacting. Thus, such sensors can contribute to the information needed to allow architecture to engage in a more meaningful type of two-way dialogue between architecture and occupant — where the occupant would react and the architecture would react, but between them there would be an ongoing language in the architectural fabric that would unite them both. And it is in creating this rule-based language that your role as an architect is pivotal. For, you would be creating the thumb-print upon which that adaptive architectural language is based.

Designing an Architectural Language from the Seemingly Complex

Of course, the one thing that stresses one person may be the exact thing that relaxes another. So, how can you as an architect account for this when you are designing a building? Or furthermore an adaptive building?

The key would be to take all of the limiting factors, and come up with solutions that speak to them all by analyzing what unites them. If you try to simplify too soon, you may miss the clues within patterns that appear when looking at the more general, larger and seemingly more complex picture. But, with new technologies emerging like the wearable Q Sensor, it is becoming easier to aggregate data, and then manipulate that data to design interesting frameworks and architectural design patterns that speak to your occupants in renewed ways. For, if you gain a more in depth picture of how your occupants feel when experiencing your building design elements, you will most likely be inclined to experiment more to find what works, hone in on what is successful to built upon that, and improve your own connection with your clients — where you are able to design buildings more personally for them.

For your reference, the following is a video where you can learn more about how the Q Sensor works:

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: juhansonin | Flickr

We are currently in the midst of an information revolution which I often hear overwhelms people, particularly as they strive to solve complex problems where they need to rely on specific information to know how and when to act upon their choices in order to find a clear path toward their goal.

Often, there is so much information that those same people even have trouble trying to decipher what their best choices are in the first place. So, how is architectural design being affected by this informational influence which brings with it such overwhelm?

I think that there is information that architecture conveys through its building design elements, that if thought of differently and if presented differently, could drastically improve lifestyle for its occupants — not only to solve problems which they currently have, but to also help predict future problems that may arise, by thus, engaging with them to make healthy changes earlier-on so as to prevent those problems from ever surfacing in the first place.

It is most clearly evident that such an adaptive architectural design would have most immediate and beneficial use when engaging with an occupant’s daily habits, physiological biorhythms and other occupant-specific personalized traits.

For, it is within architecture that a sort of melting pot occurs where we have different emerging and advancing technologies that can carry out different, yet interrelated tasks — like augmented reality and ubiquitous computing which, when teamed up with other advances in areas like industrial design, can fuse not just within a building, but throughout it, to create a dynamic environment where that occupant can flourish.

For example, if an occupant is having trouble concentrating when trying to finish a task in their workspace, perhaps the sensory architecture can be designed in such a way as to promote creative thinking during certain times of day. Even more specifically, perhaps a workspace could sensorially morph dependent upon the type of work that an occupant needs to do within it, dynamically — from moment to moment. Even the most subtle of sensory building element changes can make a huge difference — and it is upon these types of details that occupant lifestyle is built.

Pulling from “Unused” Information to Improve Occupant Environments

You can see in the following video lecture, entitled It’s Time to Redesign Medical Data (presented by Thomas Goetz), that already there is thought being given to simplifying informational complication to help alleviate people’s lives. In the case of this lecture, Goetz proposes a re-design of medical blood test data which is usually given to doctors to translate back to their patients.

Instead, he argues that such information should be presented differently and also be placed in the hands of the patient. After all, it is they who are going to have to change their lifestyle in order to bring any worrisome medical results back into healthier ranges. What good is such overly-complicated data if only the doctor sees it and doesn’t have time to fully translate all that it means for the patient? As the saying goes…so much can be lost in translation. And I think it will be the patient who suffers most.

I find this thinking quite interesting and I can’t help but think of how architecture can be improved by looking through a similar lens. As new advances in technology emerge, you as an architectural designer, stand it prime position to help those sensory elements within your building be best “translated” for your occupants. And because occupants spend a large part of their lives within such architecture, buildings have a great chance to engage with them in not only larger “a-ha” moments, but also in more subtle ways that truly help occupants begin to “translate” information about themselves back to themselves. I think it is here where maximum benefit can also occur.

The following is a video of the above mentioned lecture. The key here is watch this video as an architect, through your own architectural lens. As you watch, think about what other types of occupant information are underutilized (or not utilized at all) that can be translated back to your occupants to help them flourish.

I think that architecture can become part of a positive feedback loop that engages occupants to not only understand their lifestyle habits, but also serves to help keep them going, improve upon them or change them if needed. After all, one’s environment does play a major role in the way we not only interact with each other, but with ourselves — not only in how we perceive ourselves and what we are capable of doing, but also in how we take steps toward achieving the best version of ourselves, for both short and long-term.

After all, isn’t it better to make a more subtle life-changing adjustment now in order to prevent a more major problem from arising in the future? An alternative would be to not do anything now, thus waiting until a large problem arises where more drastic action would need to take place. And by then, it could even be too late. The key is to empower your building occupants, not just with broad architectural strokes, but also with more subtle and detailed refinements that will meet their needs both today and well into their future.

How might you think that architecture today can become more of an active player in preventative building design? How might we design architecture that makes use of its emerging technologies to help occupants get to the root of a need or a problem? You might also ask yourself more simple questions about how your architecture can further engage your occupants in a way that gives them what they need, before they even realize that they need it.

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: R. Butler | Flickr

Along with many other innovations that are surfacing today, the Responsive Environments Group at MIT is working on a prototype that, if successful, may make the light switch a thing of the past. (1)

Their new lighting technology will be responsive by being able to adjust both lighting intensity and color balance to the specific activities that are going on within an architectural space — it would work by being able to monitor the light reading wherever a user happens to put the sensors. So for example, if you place the light sensor within the space where you usually only need task lighting, then the light will adjust accordingly, making sure that you have enough light either from natural daylight, the responsive lighting solution or some combined ratio both. (1)

While this responsive lighting innovation may sound somewhat simple in principle, it does take an interesting step toward providing a tool for greater adaptive design approaches. There are so many parts within buildings today that are static, being made to function in almost binary terms, with only “on” or “off” choices — beyond lighting, think of how static building surfaces often are: including wall surface materials, window configurations and even floor and ceiling installations.

The Power of Transience within Your Design

I think that we are in an age where the onset of new adaptive design technologies will help spaces evolve to include more dynamic and fluid behaviors — which will help to make architecture more malleable, versatile and responsive to occupant needs. The key is to move beyond only having a technology radiate stimuli the way a song might sound on a piano if only played with one note.

Instead, architectural technology should be a tool with which, you as an architect, use “responsive gradation” — making the stimuli which your building occupants perceive sound like a beautiful song played on a piano using the full range of notes played at different times, for different lengths, for different intensities and in different combinations — to be most appreciated by your building occupants within the areas that they carry out their most sensitive activities.

So, as an architect, pay attention to where your occupants carry out their activities, look at the way in which they behave and the characteristics of their environment that impact them through their senses in meaningful ways. Then think about how gradation can step in, to give them more than choice, to additionally give them a freedom by which they can enjoy their environments in their entirety, adjusting to their personal preferences and needs — whether they be one thing on a Monday and something entirely different by Friday.

The beauty of pushing toward “responsive gradations” within an architectural environment, is the lessening dependency upon a typical “default” way of thinking, and thus, designing. The advantage is the move from a one-size-fits-all (throw in some lighting) approach to a more thoughtful and strategic spectral arrangement where environments become more attuned to the things that are going on within them.

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(1) Intelligent, Adaptive Lights Reduce Energy Use by 90 Percent. Good. November 19, 2010.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: rootoftwo | Flickr

Image: rootoftwo | Flickr

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 future built works.

In fact, to see the slideshow of these projects in action, Click here.

3 Simple Mindset Shifts for You To Think About

1. Your Design Process — Think about how the possibilities of adaptive architecture would impact the way you design. Just imagine how that would change your programming stages alone.
2. Convergence –Think about how you would use the convergence of breakthroughs from disciplines like nanotechnology, neuroscience, and biomimicry to improve the lifestyles of your occupants in almost limitless new ways.
3. Sensemaking –Architecture which adapts could be coded with simple rules; thus, embedding within it an underlying thumbprint, predisposing its behavior.

   As an architect, you will need to have your built works “make sense” of a lot of incoming information (coming from your occupants and the environment).

   Your job as Sensemaker is only just beginning.

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: woodleywonderworks | Flickr

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 engage your occupants in renewed ways. So, will the way your occupants “touch” your design change?

As buildings gain more sophisticated user interfaces, transient sensorial stimuli and information networked to help it make smart decisions — interactive and adaptive designs will call upon occupants to touch buildings more, less and differently (depending on the situation).

The “impressions” that your occupant will form while experiencing your architecture could potentially be more immersive, automated, controlled or even augmented. For instance, they could experience something like a virtual augmented display personalized for them as they travel through your design. Hence, their impression and understanding of you designed space is likely to change.

There are also implications involving the very notion of not only how an occupant “touches”, but also how far their “touch” can reach. With the development of adaptive architecture, be prepared to design architecture where your occupant’s “touch” can have greater consequence— not only for them, but also for your building as a whole.

Please Tell Me What You Think

I would really like to get your feedback on my post today, so please leave me a comment in the form below. And if you enjoyed it, make sure you share it with your Twitter followers by “tweeting” it using the re-tweet button on this page.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: Aranda\Lasch | Flickr

Image: Aranda\Lasch | Flickr

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 a multitude of changes that would impact everything from the architect’s design process to the occupant’s experience. As new technological innovations surface and new scientific discoveries are unveiled this adaptive architecture will truly revolutionize the way we live with space.

These types of investigations certainly do push the envelope — helping us to develop more innovative architectural approaches.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Take a look at the Transitory Objects slideshow by going here.

What are your first impressions? How do you think such investigations can help architecture advance? Do you know of any other projects like these?

(1) Cline, Elizabeth. Building Without Walls. Seed Magazine. July 9, 2009.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman