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 regulations would be discussed separately from those design ideas and regulations that conform to the school category — and likewise with an office building category and so on.

So, often because of this, there is a categorization going on within architecture, and I wonder if there are a lot of missed opportunities, where the things that we are learning about advanced hospital designs can help to influence what is going on within school designs and vice versa. So, with the diagram here you can see hospital, school and office building types. Now, instead of keeping these as separate compartmentalized and dividing building types, why don’t we take a look at how we could learn from each of them, and those successful moments within each building types can help inform the others.

So for instance, learning which may typically associate with a school may really help those working in an office building, or those designing an office building. Similarly, learning can help the design of a hospital, because within a hospital and an office (while not so obvious because as a school where there are students learning, within a hospital there are patients and they have a lot of learning to do) — while they are preparing to go home, they are learning about their illness, how to take care of it and so on. Also the medical staff are learning as well, while working on patients, they are learning from each other, communicating, many times learning on the fly. Within an office building there are often projects going on where learning and brainstorming needs to take place, conferences maybe going on, other types of training, so what we learn within a school about learning and teaching can actually help hospital designs or office designs or a museum designs, and the list goes on.

Now to follow through on the diagram, within an office building what might you think of? Perhaps productivity? Efficiency? Well, productivity and efficiency can likewise inform and help a school to be designed and run better. It also can help a hospital to run more smoothly. And similarly within a hospital design attention can be paid to physiology where the design uses different elements to better take care of the patient from a physiological standpoint, to help them heal for instance. Well I think that physiology may extend into other branches or areas within architectural building types. For instance, by designing for student physiology, students may be able to learn better within schools. So suddenly, these different design elements and functional goals within each building type could be tied together and then that really helps to emphasize and magnify the positive effects of what different building types can do.

Similarly, physiology can help within an office building as well, this can help the employees work more effectively, efficiently, productively and perhaps even with less stress, so really this is about again developing more lateral thinking skills when you go about designing your buildings. And also it’s about expanding your boundaries, so if you are working on a hospital design, don’t limit yourself to just looking at other great hospital designs for inspiration. Try looking at what occurs within a school or an office building, if you are really working on this particular outcome that you are trying to achieve. So in the end you are adding to your design palette, you are learning about what makes great hospitals great, but then you are also able to look at other building types, understand what clues about those make them successful because, odds are, there will be learning going on within your hospital, there will be moments where efficiency or productivity are key just as much as the physiology that leads to healing for your patients.

So, expand your boundaries, look beyond your building type and this will take you a step in the right direction toward developing more lateral thinking skills as you design your building. Thank you for listening and watching. This is Maria Lorena Lehman with SensingArchitecture.com.

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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 an activity. So we have Activity A for Occupant 1 and Activity B for Occupant 2. So if this was the design of a school classroom, Activity A, could be when a student listens to a lecture, and Activity B, could be when a student engages in group learning. And as such, different students need different things, even when they’re trying to achieve the same goal. So if you take learning for instance, two students may be trying to learn by engaging in group work, but each may need to engage in different ways. One might take notes while the other is more hands-on with their learning activity. So similarly, just as a teacher must allow various student learning styles, so too must the architecture. So the lesson here is that your architectural designs shouldn’t presume that all occupants achieve the same goal in the same way. In other words your architectural design should act as a vessel housing these activities as it provides your occupants with different choices and tools which give them a means by which to engage in their various activities.

02:28 MLL: So by going back to our diagram here, you can see that one of architecture’s primary goals is to harmonize, especially as it orchestrates all of these different activities and options for its occupants. So as architecture harmonizes it actually is providing different choices, where you can see here that Occupant 1 engaging in Activity A is presented with choice one, two and three while occupant 2 engaging in Activity B is presented with architectural choices four, five, and six. And as I mentioned before, this takes advantage of architectural design’s ability to act fluidly and according to occupant’s different preferences. In this case, it will help them to achieve their goal of learning where Occupants 1 and 2 are different students. But it’s equally important that as Occupant 1 engages in Activity A, choice two for instance, that it interrelates and coordinates with the simultaneously ongoing choice six that Occupant 2 engages in during Activity B. Thus as architecture cross references and orchestrates itself, it acts as a musical composition where instead of playing a one-note song, it uses multi-note chords to compose a space and all of its ongoing occupant activities.

04:17 MLL: So in essence, the architecture is harmonizing all of the different elements which provide choices and an outlet, so that occupants can engage in their activities in the best way possible that will best suit them and their personal preferences. So it’s important to remember that the overarching goal for you is to design for the masses but to never forget the nuances that make each occupant unique. So, just as the teacher within this hypothetical classroom uses her lesson plans to teach one topic to multiple people with different learning styles, so too must your architecture use its elements to serve its multitude of occupants with similar goals, but with different ways of achieving them. So for instance in this classroom, the furniture could be designed to adapt serving not only as seating but also as digital interface platforms, room boundaries. It could be used for playing or building, it could be used for storage, and the list goes on. The main idea is to provide choices that resonate with your occupants and with your overall architectural gesture. In the end here, the main lesson is to think beyond the one size fits all solution and to think more deeply about how your occupants actually go about achieving their goals. Then use your architectural designs to orchestrate multiple and complimentary ways in which they can engage.

06:12 MLL: Thank you for listening and watching. This is Maria Lorena Lehman with SensingArchitecture.com.

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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 occupant may have a more difficult time teaching in this instance. This is one way that architecture can become interactive to assist these occupants during these periods — during these down times. So, the interactive architecture which would engage in this “just-in-time” intervention or engagement would spot through its sensors, this point here. And it would use its ability to make sense of patterns, for instance, as a first sign of this decline.

Now, before the occupant were to engage in it more in a full decline which would take them to this level here, it would intervene where the interactive architecture would actually become this point, in that line, which we’ll call treatment. Once the treatment is finished, you will notice that it reaches a point right here of stabilizing, or stabilization. At this point, the occupant is out of the danger zone. If done correctly, this interactive architecture will actually lead the occupant on a more upward path where instead they may have yielded this path, or lower. So, they would have gained because of the interactive architecture, this amount of momentum. For this reason, interactive architecture can be a great tool that you can use as an architect to really enhance the way it engages with your occupants.

The overall lesson here is that interactive architecture should leave your occupant better off than before it engaged with them. So your occupant engages in an activity within a building, whether that would be learning, healing or this could even relate to safety matters. And the architecture can use its senses to detect patterns in the occupant’s behavior through sensemaking, and then can use that information with it’s actuators to inject a “just-in-time” intervention that will ultimately assist the occupant in obtaining a better outcome with the activities that they engage in while within your building. And also, they can carry that with them once they have left your building as well.

Thank you for watching and listening. This is Maria Lorena Lehman with SensingArchitecture.com.

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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 hallway-like space towards the south. Now, supposing this is your occupant that is traveling through the space heading in this direction, they will be presented with a series of choices. First, as they’re traveling through this hallway, they may decide to take the elevator to travel vertically to the left or they will have the choice to take the stairs. Of course, depending on their needs at that time, they may need to travel through this entire space as they go in this direction, or they may like to sit down. Perhaps this is a seating area for socialization, another seating area here for socialization or contemplation, or thinking space in preparation to go into whatever programmatic function might be at the other end of this hallway.

02:31 MLL: Now, what might be interesting for you as an architect is to think beyond just putting in a space for seating. What might your occupant do there? Would it help them if they had a view of nature or access to the outdoors? Would it help them if there was a sculptural park out here, where perhaps seating or eating areas, eating outside could occur out here? So, there’s an interrelation now between the inside and the outside which could be quite nice. On the other hand, what if they decide to take the elevator versus the stair? What does that mean for their health? What does that mean in terms of their journey upward through your architectural space? Would taking the stair be more of an aesthetic experience or would taking the elevator be more of an intriguing experience, where the doors open to reveal the surprise which awaits them on the upper levels?

03:36 MLL: Furthermore, as they’re traveling in this direction up the hallway, might they get some kind of clue, perhaps earlier on in the hallway that there is a special experience, if they were to take the elevator in this direction, or a clue that the stair might be a special experience? Even from this point you’re already presenting your occupant, as they see this clue with incentive to possibly turn right, or left, depending upon what journey you think might be best for that particular occupant at that particular time, within that particular position within your space.

04:23 MLL: Furthermore, you could use way-finding as a way to communicate with your occupant. However, don’t rely too fully on way-finding as using architectural elements may provide a more beautiful and seamless solution that may actually help to uplift some of the other qualities and characteristics of your architectural space. So, by designing for occupant choice, whether to give it or restrict it, you can create an architectural narrative that can take your architecture from being a place where functions and forms just happen, to being a place where they actually thrive. And likewise, in places where they thrive, your occupants will thrive, particularly as you begin to think about where your occupants came from, whether it’s the exterior or another interior room and where they’re going.

05:31 MLL: So as you design, give some consideration to how your designs affect occupant choice and what that means for your occupants within your architectural spaces.

05:46 MLL: This is Maria Lorena Lehman with SensingArchitecture.com.

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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 window with hopefully a view of some trees or nature. On this wall might be paintings or interactive video displays or televisions. Of course, this is the patient bed or central point where the patient spends most of their time. And we also have an area for visitors, which is all very important. And this, of course, is our main entry and exit into and from the room.

01:32 MLL: Now as you can see, there is already a narrative going on within this patient room. The patient has different activities with which they need to be involved, both things that they want to do and things that their medical team and doctors are prescribing them to do, usually to help them heal and keep their spirits up while within the hospital. Some of the things that are important for you as an architect to understand when designing for your occupants in this manner might be hierarchy and timing in conjunction with your occupant needs. And of course, as I said before, their needs might be what they want and what the medical staff thinks they should want and need.

02:35 MLL: And all of this leads them on their path to recovery. I think it is here where architecture often misses a beat, where the overall architectural solution tries to share all of these requirements and activities within one space. But what I think might be most interesting for you as an architect is to track the patterns in a story-like fashion where, for instance, with timing at certain times in the day, a patient might need to engage in activities of daily living. They may need help getting to and from the restroom. At other times of day, they may need more time for contemplation or peaceful thinking where looking at the view of nature has actually often been found to help patients heal. At other times of day, they may need distraction to watch television or interactive video displays, but similarly, the video displays could also serve to inform them and teach them how to take care of themselves and prepare them for their trip home. Likewise, visitors can be allowed in at certain times.

04:33 MLL: So the room is usually, today, in a one-size-fits-all standard state. But with transient architecture, I wonder how we can pull resources together within a room to really make each activity sing. For instance, the interactive television display might actually serve to teach them or inform them with activities and exercises so they can get better and more independent over time and begin to engage more readily in their activities of daily living.

05:37 MLL: So the idea here would be for you as an architect to begin to pull the different resources within the room; like the restrooms, televisions, interactive displays, views of nature, spaces for contemplation, visitor areas, patient bed, and of course, this involves room lighting, flooring, wall materials, ceiling materials so that they might become transient and work together in an orchestrated fashion to help emphasize certain elements within a room at certain times when the patients need it most. And this might help them to recover faster and better.

06:19 MLL: Thank you for listening. This is Maria Lorena Lehman with sensingarchitecture.com.

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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 occupants inhabit the building and travel within it and experience it, they too then elicit behavior, and those behaviors also have patterns. So, the trick then becomes for you as an architect to pull all of these pattern behavioral cues together so that you can best mirror and open up that dialog of communication between building and occupant. Now, pattern detection of course can take on many forms.

01:47 MLL: So, I’ll just mention a few here. One might be variation. So, begin to look at how your building elements, both static and dynamic, play off of one another, how they vary from one another, how they’re different, and then look at how those differences affect your occupants because they too are different. They have different ages, different genders, different learning styles, different ways of socializing, and they need to know different things at different times while they’re within your space so that they can function within it optimally.

02:32 MLL: Another thing to look for might be the use of metaphor. And with this, what I mean is to simply look for patterns that your architecture brings where it can pull together and mirror something greater than itself that we recognize, or that your occupants recognize. This is a great way to bring your architecture to new heights so that it can be greater than sum of its parts. Another is juxtaposition. Begin to look at where your architectural elements contrast with one another, and how the differences between these things can actually help your occupants.

03:29 MLL: When doing all of this, as you get started and begin to focus on variation, metaphor and juxtaposition, you’ll suddenly be gaining new insight into how you can better inform your design concept. This is a question I get asked about a lot from you, my readers. When you’re beginning a project, you’re given certain programmatic requirements but you seem to get stuck on how to begin your overall grand architectural gesture and your concept which is very important because so much stems from that initial gesture. So, just begin by looking at patterns, and I think that will take you in a good direction.

04:23 MLL: Thank you, for listening. This is Maria Lorena Lehman with SensingArchitecture.com.

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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 and Facebook followers by clicking on the “re-tweet” and “like” button at the beginning of this page.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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 what your building skin needs to do? Well, there are many similarities, particularly as building skin evolves into the future by continuing to integrate sensing technologies into its “surface”.

With such technological advancements (and with ongoing movements like sustainability and biomimicry) building skins will take on renewed ways to “breath” where its systems and surfaces will be capable of things like self-assembly, self-repair and self-regulation.

Of course, these are also some of the characteristics of human skin, and to take matters further, there are many more potential similarities when you consider the pieces and parts to make all of this work — for example, did you see the sensory receptors in the latter skin video? Beneath those layers are sensory receptors which basically allow the skin, and thus the body, to extract the most pertinent and helpful information from the exterior.

Just to get You Thinking…

Really, as the architect, it is you who embeds “rules” into your building skin, and it is your building skin that will hold, process, actuate and communicate to the rest of your building’s “body”. Just as human skin maintains a systematic structure, so too does your building skin — in real-time.
Thus, you should rethink the potential of what your building “skin” can become. As it is indeed a barrier, it is simultaneously a flexible filter. Just think, your skin can become a “bridge” that pulls from the exterior to feed the inside, and visa versa.

Upon finding this right balance and optimization, architectural skin can be quite beautiful.

The following is a simple, abstraction and interpretation of a “breathing” architectural skin. What ideas does this give you? And how can you use building skin to improve your architectural environments for your occupant?

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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 responsive architecture in terms of kinetic “fields” — playing upon “layers” or “extensions”.

For this reason, the following video presents novel concepts behind how to design “kinetic fields”, and their solutions are quite intriguing. By integrating a seamless way of having systems and sub-systems relate to one another it is possible to achieve not only behavioral motion, but also renewed behavioral functions.

Take a look at the following car concepts and you will see a great illustration of what forms this type of design thinking can take. Also, in watching the following prototypes you can see how the boundaries we typically default to today can blur — suddenly location, size and function become dynamic variables inherent within a system and its materials.

Hence, as architects, we develop a greater focus upon behavior, stemming from things like location, size and function by also adding anew the variable of time.

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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, if developed further, such sensing physical objects will change the way we interact with digital media today. For instance, might such technologies help architects to “build” architectural models differently? Or might they allow for a new kind of architectural presentation that you might give to your clients?

Here’s Another Thought on How Siftables Could Impact Your Designs

In the future, architecture could expand upon its interactivity (and adaptability) with such sensing physical interfaces. Just imagine if occupants began to communicate with their environmental surroundings in completely new ways. For example, what if a grouping of Siftables could be shared by occupants, or they allowed for a new type of personalized customization?

So, what future possibilities and current uses would you like to use the Siftables for?

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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.)

What “Triggers” Motion in Your Kinetic Spaces?

Now, as you watch the second video, be sure to think about what might go into the mechanical systems that put such metal balls into motion, synchronizing with one another. Their kinetic “dance” may not be as simple as you think.

Think about what can “trigger” the motions which your forms (or environmental stimuli) emit? Can human movement trigger the motion which your architecture takes? And what does that consequent movement do to the surrounding space(s)?

Try using kinetics to bridge the gap between seemingly separate things — to build beautiful behaviors.

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