Featured Image Takeaway Design Strategy:

When your occupants look upward, what do they feel? A sense of awe? Amazement? A yearning to continue on their journey through your building? Designing a ceiling is of critical importance — and not just because this is from where much of the lighting may come. A ceiling can be sculpted to reveal masses and voids which complement what goes on below. Wonderful domes often connect occupants to the heavens, and lower ceilings often create great spaces of intimacy. I urge you to think creatively about your ceiling designs as they are more than a “topping” — rather, they are expressions that help your architectural design sections to come alive.

To Apply This Strategy, Ask Yourself:

Image: tr.robinson | Flickr

So often, as an architect, attention is paid to the visual senses as masses, materiality, and even lighting are carefully chosen for a particular design vision. But how do you as an architect target more intangible things, like building air quality?

I read an article recently that describes one way to track patterns of building air quality changes within a room. You see, by using a sensor-embedded Roomba, researchers were able to “map” any detrimental changes in a room’s air quality as the Roomba traveled about its path. So, the next question becomes — what to do with such a map?

First, I would say that air quality within an environment is quite important. And by understanding more about the quality of air within a room’s design, you may be able to spot leaks,off-gasing, or even toxins that invisibly impact your occupant’s health. While using the Roomba is a novel idea, it does invite one to think about Read more

Image: jurvetson | Flickr

With the uprising of more technologies that seem to track everything from sleep, to diet, to other behavioral patterns, environmental design is becoming more of an important player in helping to collect such clues that consequentially help make a person’s life better. Such clues reveal patterns that can be used to determine where, when, and how a person might make adjustments in their life to improve issues like their health, productivity, memory, creativity, or even to help them engage in more socially-conscious behaviors, like green living.

So, the key here for you as an architect is to understand how patterns are inherent to how your designed spaces get used — and such patterns, upon their collection, can help you to design better for your building occupant, and can help your building to adapt in real-time to your occupants’ everchanging needs, as they need them. Especially, the more subtle ones that make a big difference.

I’m sure you’ve already begun to see Read more

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There is a principle when it comes to systems optimization which says that if one part of the system is broken, you should look at the part just before it — because it is likely that that is where the problem really originates from. And to me, this principle can be carried through into architecture as you begin to look at how an occupant travels through built forms, from space to space, or from room to room. I think of course that the design of the grand featured and climactic gesture within an architecture is of paramount importance, but I also think that the transition which leads occupants into and from that featured space is of extremely high importance as well. With a transitional space within architecture, you have the power to “set up” an occupant impression. You can give them hints about what is to come, or you can minimize what awaits them to ultimately give them a grand surprise. Similarly, as an occupant exits a main and grand featured architectural space, a transition can help them to synthesize what they have experienced, as they form their last memories and impressions that they will carry with them once exited. Transitions can occur in the exterior and the interior, and within what is between the two. The key is to think about transition as a means of preparation for what is next, or synthesis of what has come. Because your occupants will always be taking next steps as they experience your building, those transitions will help them to synthesize what they are experiencing, while also preparing them for the desirable reaction which you as a designer hope for.

Sensory Design Research Paper by Maria Lorena Lehman Published in Intelligent Buildings International

Today, I am eager to announce that my latest research paper has just been published in the peer-review research journal, Intelligent Buildings International.

The paper, entitled How Sensory Design Brings Value to Buildings and their Occupants by Maria Lorena Lehman, delves into why sensory design has such potential to Read more

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 more

What if upon entering your building, you could see actual signals being sent to you from your occupants about how they feel while experiencing your building design? Would you design differently if you knew when within your building design they felt happy? Or in awe? Or stressed?

Now that technologies like the new Q Sensor (a type of bio sensor which tracks the stress levels of a person that is wearing it) are coming into play — we are in a time that is providing some very interesting opportunities for the architectural profession. For instance, you may be able to get more detailed information on what factors affect your occupant most while they take the journey through your building designs. You could potentially get to the bottom of what and why particular elements within your built space usually trigger certain reactions in your occupants. And, you could use that information to inform your design as it responds adaptively in real-time, or you could use it toward evolving your own body of architectural design works as you take what you’ve discovered into your future projects.

If used correctly to uncover emotional triggers, such a wearable bio sensor could give you quite fascinating information about your occupants likes and dislikes. And by learning from all of those occupants that are wearing these wrist worn sensors, your building may be able to adapt and modify itself to respond to the way in which they are reacting. Thus, such sensors can contribute to Read more

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 more

Image: Jace | Flickr

There are times where you, as an architect, can learn a lot about what your occupants will need. But during those times, it is important to question the validity of your information — does what you are learning about occupant behavior follow suit with what you have always believed? Or is there something new that you are noticing that contradicts what you’ve always thought about the way occupants behave? Either way, it’s time for you to start challenging what know about your occupants, or at least build upon the knowledge you already have.

Personalized Design By Observing Occupants In Multiple Places

I recently watched Jason Fried in his lecture called Why Work Does Not Happen at Work, and within this lecture are some parallels. In his talk (which I will post at the end of this article for your reference), Jason Fried explains how work always seems to happen everywhere but at work. Of course, I am sure you have seen examples of what he is talking about when you go to the nearest café, travel on a plane, or with your own experience of working from home.

Thus, it is important to realize that your occupants engage in certain behaviors in multiple places. And because of this, if you solely try to design an innovative office building by only looking at the way the office building type has been designed in the past — you will most likely miss out on a wide variety of new opportunities.

In today’s global and more mobile society, you need to look beyond the boundaries of our existing buildings for the secrets to what makes your occupants tick. Observe how they work when they are at work — but also when they are not at work. Observe how occupants learn when they are not in school. And observe how they Read more

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 more