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 more

As current buildings make their way toward becoming interactive architectural environments that increasingly gain capabilities to adapt, you can begin to imagine how that kind of building’s communication system will act like a “nervous system” that travels throughout the building infrastructure. But you may ask yourself, just how might this “wiring” take place? And how can we prevent that communication infrastructure from being redundant both in the labor it takes to build, and in its ability to sync with dispersed sensors throughout the building.

According to the article entitled Turning HVAC into RFID, HVAC ducts are a very useful way to create a building wide antenna that can serve to help process incoming information from RFID antenna sensor networks that control various systems within a building. What this all means is that most of a building’s nervous system can go from being wired, to being wireless.

As was pointed out in the article, we have many systems within a building that work from sensors, including temperature control, fire and security systems. And while such wireless communication may prove to work very well for certain building needs, it may not quite work as well for others. But just as with any new technological ideas, there will be limitations and challenges. However, finding ways to make communication more efficient within smart buildings, is a step in the right direction.

Adding Functionality by Enhancing Your Building’s “Nervous System”

Today many buildings are rather static, depending on their own occupants to make them “operable” by physically adjusting so many of their components. Yes, buildings today have an array of Read more

So often interactive adaptive architectural interfaces must rely on picked up cues that are either created from occupant behaviors or from different objects within an environment that move, change or transmit other real-time information. And with these types of cues comes concern from building occupants about how “control” will be established between them and their surrounding built environment. For if a building is indeed adaptive, where are the control points? Who sets the rules? And how can the resulting architectural transient behavior be seamless for both the building system and its occupant?

Well, an exciting new brain computer interface technology has been demonstrated as a new way for users to interface with their machines. And I think such technology can serve as a liaison between occupants and their buildings. Created by Emotiv Systems, this head-worn device will literally allow one to signal change by simply using one’s own thinking power. Taking only a few minutes to put on this wireless interface technology, suddenly there is so much that can potentially be done to alleviate problem points with which many of today’s interface technologies often struggle.

Within an adaptive building, such technology could greatly ease the way that a building and its occupants communicate. While privacy is indeed a concern, there is an element of control here where the wearer of this interface technology must visualize in order to create the change they wish to experience.

As you will see in the video (at the end of this article), this head-worn device may seem a bit clunky by today’s standards — but if you can imagine where such technology might take us, you will see that the rippling effects in terms of usability can be far-reaching. Not only can such a device impact the many uses for Read more

I think that as we progress into the future, new technologies should help us reconnect with nature in entirely new ways — rather than as a divide by which we further separate from it. For this reason, I find it quite interesting to have come across an interactive floor projection design which engages people to experience a texture from nature in motion. And that texture closely resembles the rippling effects of water. As people walk on the dry floor where this projection is, ripples of water virtually propel from their feet as if to imply they are walking on water. Needless to say, technology (if used creatively) can connect us to new sides of nature with unexpected behaviors in unexpected places.

While such a display seems quite fun (which I think it is), there can be many practical applications for such immersive displays which can work by engaging the human body to move and react to the physics which prompt it. Just as real water has its own set of physical and behavioral properties which dictate how it responds, so too can an interactive floor projection.

For instance, such motion textures could help people recovering from injuries in hospitals by helping them to engage in therapeutic exercises and other behavioral activities that can help them to recover and heal at whatever rate works best for them — thus, a personalized guide which can encourage them, help them reconnect with their body to become stronger, healthier and more proactive. In hospitals, for instance, interactive projections might be a great way to help Read more

Who would have thought that a concrete block could be rendered invisible? Well, with the use of augmented reality technologies, just that has been achieved. By allowing sensing technologies which are capable of face-detection to act as an intermediary, the invisible concrete block system is able to tell exactly where an observer’s line of sight is, in relation to the concrete block. With that information, the system projects images of the surroundings that coincide with that observers perspective — making a concrete block render virtually invisible.

I think that such an augmented reality exhibit is quite inspiring to see because it shows how designers can push certain boundaries by combining a unique recipe between technologies, materials and their own creative talents. For instance, just imagine if within your own building design you are able to take a material that has been thought of (and physiologically perceived) in a certain way for a long time, and then create an Read more

When you walk through a building like a mall or an airport where there is a lot of signage, and often much of that signage is advertising, you might either feel somewhat interrupted as you travel to your destination, or you might feel helped by finding a “just-in-time” building directory, pertinent advertising or other relevant piece of information that you can use. Such wayfinding can exist at many scales…from being located within a building to being displayed prominently on a street as a billboard. And today, such signage is getting a facelift not only to become more digital, but to be more interactive — which is bringing with it a new kind of personalization for those passersby.

Of course, such interactive signage in the form of advertisements was taken to one extreme in movies like Minority Report. And while, on one hand, that brings with it all kinds of issues about what that kind of interactivity (where public advertisements appear personalized to you as you walk down the street) might do to privacy (as has been shown to be a concern by many people), there are some practical applications today which can be extracted from those Minority Report portrayals. And these can serve to improve not only the aesthetics of building signage, but also the usefulness and helpfulness of the information which appears on that signage.

Making wayfinding a better experience includes tackling issues that deal with timing, understanding the demographics of those that will experience that signage and a designer having a more intimate understanding of how people perceive, process, and respond. While more interactivity is emerging on the façades of commercial buildings, it becomes evermore important for designers to take a look at how such signage can better Read more

As an architect, is important for you to understand your occupants as more than just and “occupant load”, and really begin to understand the demographics of who will be using your building and why — and most importantly what do they want to achieve when within it. This is important because as new technologies surface, architecture is gaining greater ability to personalize itself to its occupants, in real-time — hence, the promises and challenges of adaptive architecture.

An article I read recently entitled User Interface Design for Beginners, Intermediates or Experts, explains how user interface design often caters to the “intermediate” user because of the simple fact that most users will fall within this category. This is because very few users are actually beginners and even fewer are experts. (As was explained in the article, the reason for this is that beginners very rarely stay beginners as they will soon advance to being intermediate users.) The article further explains that while it is still very important to meet the needs of experts and beginners, user interface designers should very heavily keep the intermediate users in mind as they design the bulk of an interface. (1)

So, what does this mean for adaptive architecture and its architectural design usability?

As a designer of interactive and adaptive space, how do you make decisions about where to personalize elements for occupants, while still making them collectively accessible? Furthermore, who should you target? Why? And when?

An Adaptive Classroom Design for Learners

Let’s discuss the example of the design of an adaptive classroom architecture. Should this design’s occupant experience cater to mostly intermediate, beginner or expert learners? If you are the designer in this example, you might ask yourself the following questions: Read more

Buildings are much more than a surrounding envelope which merely exists in a state separated from its occupants and their objects and tools. Instead, buildings are part of the landscape which helps occupants to live better. And now, with more sensory technologies, architecture can connect anew with occupants to greatly uplift their lifestyle… through their objects and tools that they use everyday.

Much of this is done by making interactive surface design within your building highly effective.

Many times, people think of sensing technologies within architecture as a way for the building to pick up all kinds of cues from just the occupants, but that is only one part of how a building can read or interpret the language and context of what is happening within it. In fact, a key way for a building’s systems to engage with occupant behaviors is by sensing cues from an occupant’s objects — like a bottle of medicine that might need to be refilled or random food from the kitchen that might be calling for a good recipe so it doesn’t go to waste.

Such is the challenge being worked on by Intel when developing Oasis, an interactive surface design technology that can be used in many places throughout a home, or for any building type should the need arise. Really, it can work on a simple premise: as objects and their respective movements occur, sensory technologies gather Read more

Just imagine wearing clothes that monitor your body’s processes throughout the day. Well, in a recent issue of Scientific American it was found that MIT researchers have come up with a piezoelectric fiber that can record and produce sound. So, what does this mean for architecture and why would this impact you and your designs? I think the answer is in understanding that clothes can act as a bridge between your occupant and your building.

You see, as your occupant travels through your building, your building can actually begin to aggregate data sent by their clothes — which can not only engage occupants in what to do, but can also tell the building what to do and how to better respond and engage those occupants. Furthermore, your building can collect data from all of its occupants at any given time and begin to respond for the collective whole as well as each individual occupant — for instance, by understanding more about their human process of body temperature, blood pressure or movement speed and location.

The clothes of tomorrow can become a unifying bridge between occupants and their built environment — and there is a huge Read more

The work going on over at the SENSEable City Lab at MIT will really make you think. You might start by simply asking yourself what would happen if little omni lights (think stars in the sky, but much much closer) could move around responsively and dynamically through space — and move transiently in coordination with one another. Well, this direction is what the group over at MIT is working on right now — and their project is called Flyfire.

You may already know what can happen when you start with just one pixel-like point when working with computers to design architecture in programs like AutoCAD or 3D Studio Max. But, what will happen when when that pixel-like point becomes more of an omni light in real life— a three-dimensional point in space that has the ability to harmonize with others of its own type?

For starters, these little hovering lights can be orchestrated to yield not only two-dimensional displays that light up in a rainbow of colors, but can further align themselves into three-dimensional free-forms or sculptures. It kind of gets one thinking about what might happen, from an experiental point of view, if people could literally walk-through light displays, where architectural boundaries become not only transient, but also Read more