Image: swimparallel | Flickr

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]…

Image: NASA Goddard Photo and Video | Flickr

Buildings today continue to move from static to fluid design, and this fluidity is expressed by integrating not only new materials with amazing behavioral properties, but also by pulling information patterns from a building’s context. Interestingly, it is this “pulling” of sorts that can bring architectural fluidity toward architectural adaptability.

So, what does it mean for a building to pull? And where might it pull from?

As we can see with the internet, our mass populations are collecting large quantities of information about the world in which we live — with cues about how we live in that world. As an architect, you should look upon such collections as proverbial goldmines, within which you can sift to find nuggets of collective wisdom for you designs.

Extracting information and capitalizing upon it can be easier said than done. A building that pulls information from the internet, a country’s population, a weather pattern or even a neighborhood’s political race, can range from “ingenious” all the way to “controversial”. Suddenly, your designed architecture space can find new ways to engage and interact with its surrounding contexts — and when executed correctly can help those that experience it.

Does an architecture that pulls from the masses merely act as a mirror? An interpreter? Or as the loyal opposition?

It’s all In the Stars

Just like the seemingly infinite array of patterns found in the sky above, you can use your building as an outward demonstration of what is …[Read Full Article]…

Image: Sensing Architecture from Wordle

I just couldn’t resist! I had to try out Wordle — a new site where one can create their own word clouds based on inputted data. In fact, I created a Sensing Architecture Wordle word cloud (as you can see in the image found within this post). Wordle presents just one form of information visualization; however, new ways of seeing information are beginning to surface all over – and they are making sense of greater and greater complexity.

Places like Visual Complexity.com host a wide variety of examples where information has been simplified in visual form. Visit this site — it is quite interesting to see the wide variety of different information types that have been made visual. They have examples ranging from particle systems to music tracks … You should check it out!

Such information visualizations will appear in many places as their simplicity will be quite valued. Look for their emergence within buildings as designers …[Read Full Article]…