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: aloshbennett | Flickr

The two: building and occupants, have an unparalleled relationship where each adapts to the other over time and in different ways — and as new technologies, and in particular gesture technology, makes its way into the forefront, I think that buildings will be able to communicate with occupants through more natural, nonverbal and real-time cues.

For this reason, by not only observing communication gestures, but by also making use of them, you will be able to create architecture that not only better adapts to your occupants as their daily needs change, but you will also be able to enhance your own design skillset as you will better understand your client’s and occupants’ behavioral signals, so you can envision architectural solutions for them that they may not be able to articulate verbally.

There is an entire design fabric that you can acquire by simply understanding nonverbal communication elicited by your occupants as they inhabit built environments. In other words, occupants have behaviors and habits which can help you optimize your current design visions — and help you formulate renewed design visions that are innovative, improving upon present-day conventions about what we think occupants do in building designs.

Understanding Occupant Behaviors Using Communication Gestures

An open-source gesture technology which has surfaced is a glove within which is embedded an accelerometer, and from which information can be gathered and coupled with computer scripts, which link the wearer’s communication gestures to move such things as robotic objects. (1) While I do not see a future where all building occupants are always wearing such gloves to remotely control or interact with all of the objects within their surroundings, I do see certain uses where architecture can give occupant gestures meaning, particularly naturally occurring and/or intentional gestures.

For instance, many buildings today have lights that turn on and off automatically depending upon when and where an occupant enters into a room. As such, I can perceive a future where such natural and simple occupant behaviors (like walking into or exiting a room) within a building are used to develop environments which adapt more personally and more transiently to occupant needs at just the right moments within their experiential journey. The key here is to not overlook the naturally occurring communication gestures that occupants inherently emit as they go about their daily lives, even the simple and often overlooked ones, for these can be just as useful to you as a designer as their more obvious and purposefully-driven hand or body gesture signals.

How Everyday Objects Can Tie Architecture to the Human Body

Now, as new ways continue to develop for architecture to communicate with its occupants through more natural interfaces, I do see objects within architectural environments being used as a powerful intermediary between building and human body. And as more mobile and ubiquitous sensing technologies are embedded within everyday objects (such as furniture, lighting, appliances, and hand-held objects) the collective amount of information gathered will be able to communicate behavioral clues about an occupant. Thus, everyday objects are a means by which architecture can “interpret” its occupants’ behaviors. And from these, the building may respond accordingly.

Either way, the key becomes to design your buildings in a way that renews, with meaning, the relationship between a building and its occupants — whether they be communication gestures that are sensed through objects within an environment, observed as natural occupant body movements or even accessed through wearable sensors which monitor occupant behaviors.

The key is for you as an architect to not overlook the nuances in your occupants’ behaviors — not only focusing on the big things like when and where they sleep, eat, and work, but also by focusing on the little things like how they like to re-energize while working as compared to while exercising. Another aspect to consider is how your occupants communicate with each other nonverbally as they carry on with their daily functions. You can even take this a step further by looking at nuances in your occupants’ behavior when they see something of beauty — noticing what inspires them, tires them or teaches them.

Needless to say, as an architect there may be times where you need to act as a detective to unravel the nonverbal language which your occupants reveal, for there is likely great inspiration and knowledge within those nonverbal communication gestures from which you can draw more beautiful and innovative architectural designs that are equally unique as they are universal.

Citation:

(1) Covert, Adrian. Open-Source, Accelerometer-Equipped Glove Allows for Infinite Control Possibilities. PopSci.com. July 9, 2009

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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

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

Individual atoms in a 90 nanometer scoop of Nitinol.
Image: jurvetson | Flickr

Why does inspiration strike when thinking about building design in terms of a convergent assembly of elements? Well, here is an explanation about just what a “convergent assembly” means for manufacturing at the molecular level.

Todays manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. [...] One robotic arm assembling molecular parts is going to take a long time to assemble anything large — so we need lots of robotic arms: this is what we mean by massive parallelism. While earlier proposals achieved massive parallelism through self replication, today’s “best guess” is that future molecular manufacturing systems will use some form of convergent assembly. In this process vast numbers of small parts are assembled by vast numbers of small robotic arms into larger parts, those larger parts are assembled by larger robotic arms into still larger parts, and so forth. If the size of the parts doubles at each iteration, we can go from one nanometer parts (a few atoms in size) to one meter parts (almost as big as a person) in only 30 steps.

- zyvex.com, Introduction to the Core Concepts of Molecular Nanotechnology

The Future of Scalability in Architecture

As if to build upward from some sort of DNA structure, building an assembly of parts at smaller scales then fitting that assembly within a larger assembly give should give you “food for thought”.

What if, as an architect, you could design a sort of “DNA seed” from which your buildings would grow, not only as they are built, but also as they age over time? Could your initial design “seed” create a better outcome for your building during it’s use — especially in its later years? Well, this “seed” approach definitely calls for designing a building system with a different design mindset — a sort of “genetic” approach to design execution.

In other words, your notion of “scalability” would directly impact your final product, which would be more of a real-time rule-based system. It would be an architecture that appears to grow. Certainly different from the architecture we see today.

I challenge you to think of your building’s system in a slightly different way. In the future, it will be more than just a system made up of parts that come together at scales that you can easily “see” in one glimpse, but as a system with the power to mold itself into an almost infinite array of possibilities — but where your design vision sets its inherent order. Hence, I am speaking of a more adaptive building system approach.

But still, today we typically build a “what you see, is what you get” architecture. Instead, I see that we are at the advent of having more “genetic” building systems.

Building and assembling at the molecular level certainly brings with it some challenges, especially as the iterative process of scaling the manufacturing process upward needs to be resolved. Similarly, architects must work to design their building system from extreme detail to the scale that encompasses global and cultural concerns.

Nevertheless, your building sits upon your design ideas as it reacts to its own surrounding environment. Your design vision and execution becomes your building’s fingerprint from which it adapts, behaves and stands strong.

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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.

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Can your building speak for its city?

With the rise of social media and other easy ways to communicate your whereabouts, moods or thoughts — buildings are becoming a canvas on which a population can paint their collective information.

The Emotional Cities, a 4-month light installation project, is doing just that. City dwellers can log in their current moods and the building displays certain colors on its façade to reflect those moods.

So, why can’t buildings talk back? Why stop the conversation there?

IMPACTING A CULTURE

Once buildings get better at absorbing and translating information, they will eventually be able to make some sense of it (going beyond simply displaying an “averaged” color on its façade).

In the meantime, let’s enjoy the process of seeing ourselves “reflected” at these larger scales, and in these creative ways. Perhaps we’ll learn something new about ourselves, where we live and how we relate to one another.

Yet again, architecture can impact a culture.

Here’s the first baby-step.

© 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

Image: Raja Rc | Dreamstime

Human awareness is not as perfect as you might think. We humans are easily distracted and our attention can be fleeting. So, this notion of an “extended mind” seems to make sense. The idea as described in the Discover article entitled The Brain: How Google Is Making Us Smarter explains that the human mind is really a system made up by the human brain extending into “parts of the environment”. Ultimately, the mind comes to depend on its environment for cues and information.(1)

With the computer revolution, humans are relying more and more on machines to make up a piece of their “extended mind”. As such tools permeate human environments; I can’t help but think of how the notion of an “extended mind” may influence architecture. 

Architectural design, due to its incorporation of aesthetic and function, can almost immediately be considered as part of this “extended mind”. Buildings surround their occupants and provide for many of their needs. Such needs include sensorial stimulation, community relationship building and functional processes. Architecture may also be said to help the human mind by helping it to adapt as, it too, evolves.

First, we cannot deny that computers and other tools are continuously finding their way into architectural environments. Buildings are becoming smarter and more interactive. As architects learn new ways to cater to their building’s occupants, architectural features will become more meaningful as they strive to help occupants live better lives.

With ongoing innovations, architecture will be able to tailor its interactions to occupant styles, tastes and needs in real-time. Architecture itself may become “hub-like” in that it provides a new kind of place for idea-sharing and experience enhancement. As interactive design installations gain popularity, occupants will be able to experience themselves and others in new ways. Information will take on different interactive qualities and architecture will relate more personably to its occupants.

The notion of an “extended mind” will continue to evolve as interactive architecture becomes increasingly main-stream. In addition, these advanced environments may help our minds to evolve as well. Consequently, more interaction with our environments may mean that greater resources will be readily available to us in real-time. Just as Google has placed an abundance of information at our fingertips (literally)(1), interactive architecture will have the power to improve our experiences via augmented realities. Thus, our “extended minds” may connect to architectural design in whole new ways.

(1) Zimmer, Carl. The Brain: How Google Is Making Us Smarter. Discover. January 15, 2009.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman