Video Summary

In today’s video I explain how you can hone your lateral design thinking skills, enabling you to design more effective, more inspiring and more innovative buildings. In understanding the mindset shift I discuss in the video, you will be better able to identify clues that will help to make your designs better for your building occupants — whether they be patients or medical staff within a hospital, students or teachers within a school, or employees within an office building.

The key is for you to develop a way of seeing your own work, and the work of others, through a unique lens that draws out not only inspiration, but actual design methods that work. Watch this video to see how you can begin to spot those pivotal design clues so you can find new ways to increase building performance.

Video Transcript

Maria Lorena Lehman: This is Maria Lorena Lehman with SensingArchitecture.com. In today’s video, I am going to talk about how you as an architect can begin to develop more lateral thinking skills when you go about designing your buildings. So often in journals or books or even magazines, I see architectural building types broken down, where they are separated from each other, so in a discussion about hospitals a lot of different design ideas and …[Read Full Article]…

Video Summary

In the video today, I lead you through an exploration of responsive gradations, where your architecture assumes more adaptive compositions to engage with your occupants as they engage in varying activities. And just as your occupant’s engage in different activities, so too, can your architecture.

By taking on the example of a classroom’s adaptive architecture, and the various elements within it that must speak to the architecture — it is possible to evolve from a more static mentality to approach a more fluid way of orchestrating the space in time, for an increasingly customized student learning.

Video Transcript

00:08 Maria Lorena Lehman: This is Maria Lorena Lehman with SensingArchitecture.com. In today’s video, I am going to discuss how Adaptive Architecture can be designed as more personalized for occupants through responsive gradations. And this can be achieved by first evolving from a more modular approach into something more fluid and transient, and using that as a way of thinking toward your design approach.

00:42 MLL: So within this diagram, there are various occupants. Here we have Occupants 1 and 2. And within our hypothetical situation here, each occupant has …[Read Full Article]…

Video Summary

Occupants engage in all sorts of activities as they travel about your building designs. Some of these activities can range from things like learning to healing — and your buildings sensors can pick up on their behavioral patterns to detect (through its sensemaking abilities) how they might be doing. The reason, and key for this, is to determine the best time within their day to interact with them through your architectural design.

Thus, the main lesson in today’s video is to show you how and why interactive architecture should maintain the goal of leaving your occupant better of than when it first engaged with them. Particularly, if at that time they could benefit from the architectural feature/function available to them.

As the architecture uses its senses to detect patterns in occupant behaviors, it can intervene in an attempt to assist the occupant in obtaining a better outcome. In short, interactive design should not exist just for the sake of an “empty” interaction, but should be filled with a goal that leads occupants toward some sort of improvement, dependant upon building type and real-time occupant need.

Video Transcript

00:00 Maria Lorena Lehman: This is Maria Lorena Lehman with SensingArchitecture.com. Today I’m going to talk about interactive architecture and how you as an architect can use just-in-time interventions by using interactive architecture to engage your occupants in a way that is more predictive so that interactive architecture can be used as a goal toward leaving your occupant better off than when that interactive architecture first engaged them.

Now, to give you a better idea of what I’m talking about and how you can incorporate this into your own work, take a look at this diagram. Here you can see an axis of occupant behavior where along this axis they will be engaging in different activities within your building like healing or learning, depending upon the building type. Now, this might be a typical arc where an occupant’s activity is moving along in this direction — and suddenly, during the day, they might experience a slump of some kind, and suddenly their functionality, or the building’s functionality rather, begins to move on a downward trend.

So, for instance, if this were a hospital, the occupant’s healing may have slowed down for some reason. If this were a school, the occupant, student in this case, may have a harder time learning during this instance — or the teacher, who is also an …[Read Full Article]…

Video Summary

In the video today, I delve into various ways architectural design speaks to its occupants as it inherently provides “choice”. And as an architect, you hold the key as you design such architectural elements, which all affect your occupant in a multitude of ways. For instance, many of these elements either compete with each other, or work with each other, as they offer incentives (or deterrents) that may influence your occupant’s decision-making as they travel through your building design.

Follow along as I show you, through simple diagrammatic form, how you are inevitably filling your design spaces with choices — affecting the daily lives of your occupants in so many ways. As you will see, one of the lessons to be learned here is that you should be aware of what you offer to your occupants through your building designs, for they may very well choose (and do) what you offer.

Video Transcript

00:08 Maria Lorena Lehman: This is Maria Lorena Lehman with SensingArchitecture.com. In today’s video, I’m going to explore how architectural design affects occupant choice and what exactly that means for your occupants. Because hopefully as you design architecture for your occupants, you aren’t just simply trying to meet a list of programmatic requirements and trying to insert those programmatic requirements and spatial functions into allotted spaces, without giving some serious consideration into the relationships between those programmatic elements. Because each of them speaks with one another as your occupant travels through those spaces and travels from one to the other.

00:58 MLL: So, as you can see in this diagram below, we have a diagrammatic elevator here, a stairwell here, and just a simple hallway leading outward, followed by a larger …[Read Full Article]…

Video Summary

In today’s video, I explore how a patient room within a hospital can be designed as a narrative made up of a patient’s behaviors. By being able to orchestrate room elements within a hospital design’s patient room, you as an architect can bring building elements to foster healing by tapping into both the patient’s cognitive and behavioral processes.

As you watch this video, think of how you might tap into the resources with such a room, so that they coordinate with one another — yielding elements that are much more aesthetic, comfortable and effective — as they pull from each others strengths.

Video Transcript

00:10 Maria Lorena Lehman: This is Maria Lorena Lehman with SensingArchitecture.com. In this video, I’m going to talk about occupant experience, specifically looking at healthcare architecture and a recovery room for a patient, so the patient will be our occupant in this example. As you can see here, I’ve already drawn a very, very rough diagram of a typical patient room that you might typically see. In this upper hand corner, left-hand corner, might be a restroom area. Over here in the upper right hand corner might be a …[Read Full Article]…

Video Introduction

By becoming highly aware of pattern both within your architectural designs and within the way your occupants use them, you can significantly boost your ability as an architect to design for better experiences.

There is a point where pattern becomes behavior, and your awareness of not only when this occurs, but also what it affects is key as you create building designs that will interact with your occupants.

In today’s video, I walk you through the relationships between building and occupant through the lens of pattern detection — to help you think in new ways as you formulate your initial architectural design concept.

Video Transcript

00:01 Maria Lorena Lehman: Hello, this is Maria Lorena Lehman with SensingArchitecture.com. Today, I’m going to talk about pattern detection within architectural design and how you can use pattern to really enhance your designs not only esthetically but also functionally in terms of what they can do for your occupants. So, if you’ll notice here, you have your building and your building, of course, communicates with your occupants. But then you ask, “What comes between these? What from here to here can we use as architects to really open up the dialog of communication between the two, so that each enhances the other?”

00:49 MLL: One major thing I’ve been looking at lately are patterns, and pattern detection. Because of course, the building has its own behavior and with its behavior, it yields patterns that ultimately affect occupants. And as your …[Read Full Article]…

When You Think of “Skin”…What’s the First Thing You Think Of?

Have you ever compared building skin to human skin? Well, with new developments like nanotechnology, smart materials and ubiquitous computing the time is ripe to revisit the inner-workings of the human body’s largest organ. After all, there is much to learn by taking a closer look at what lies beneath its surface — particularly as it relates to architecture.

What do you typically think of when you think of “building skin”? Does it primarily function to keep the exterior outside and the interior inside? Or do you use it to bring the outside in within certain parts like windows, ducts and doors? Perhaps you have a more avant-garde way of working with “skin” — using it as part of your architectural language that allows your building to communicate with both its interior and exterior at the same time.

Wherever you may be in your ideas and way of designing building skin, I’m sure that the human skin can help to reinforce and spark new ideas for your architectural designs. You might be surprised to discover that there are many similarities between these two “skins”, and in essence, they are both there to protect and to communicate.

Can Human Skin Inspire Your Designs?

For starters, I want to show you this simple video that clearly shows how the human skin operates physiologically. Now is a good time to watch this sneak peek:

Notice any similarities between what human skin needs to do and …[Read Full Article]…

Today, the spectrum between a part and its subparts can be vast and rather static, yet already, there are prototypes for architectural systems that can adapt to triggers to self-perpetuate their own form — and blur the boundaries between where their sub-parts begin and end. Such is the character of adaptive design.

As adaptive architecture evolves, systems will become more seamless and their behaviors will stream more fluidly. The idea of nesting, fusing and embedding behaviors into a design’s systems and sub-systems will require that you consider the in-between states of your form — slowing down real-time behavioral movements and speeding up that which appears to be standing still.

Of course, if you don’t have it already, this all will require a mindset shift from you, the designer; thus, calling upon you to think of …[Read Full Article]…

An amazing new prototype called Siftables, developed at the MIT media Lab, merges the worlds of digital media and physical interfaces. The main idea behind them is to get virtual information into your hands (literally) by using a “block-like” natural interface that transcends beyond our prototypical mouse and keyboards. Siftables are designed to be more in tune with the way we actually navigate through the world.

Each Siftable is about the size of a “cookie” that works and feels like you are, in fact, playing with toy blocks. Each block can sense the others as they are moved around and tilted by their user. Essentially, this allows for a type of collaboration between the Siftables so they can work individually and together within their group’s system.

To see Siftables for yourself, simply watch the following video and imagine how …[Read Full Article]…

Full scale architectural kinetic forms can appear to almost take off, float or flex in the most unexpected and beautiful ways.

Thus, it is no surprise that as an architect, you can use kinetic design to manipulate form in time, to give you a certain freedom to inspire and reconnect your building occupant with their surrounding space.

Kinetic form can do so much for your design when used in just the right ways. To get you thinking creatively about kinetics you can see the following video of a prize-winning art installation, where simple metal balls rise and fall smoothly and in a mesmerizing fashion.

To see for yourself, watch this video (It gets even more creative after the 1st minute.) …[Read Full Article]…