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:

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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 what other devices within a room can track and monitor patterns that would otherwise go undetected during lifelong daily occupant use.

The key is to think about the aging process of a building, the changing needs of your occupant, or even the evolving surroundings of your built environment that may well affect the quality of its interior. Thus, your built designed environments need to be maintained and optimized for occupant health.

Thus, I invite you to consider what happens to your designed spaces once built? Do they maintain that “healthy” initial state that they had when they were first constructed? Do you or your occupants have a way to check the more imperceptible living conditions of that space while it is being inhabited? And how might you go beyond the Roomba solution described above, to make sure your design keeps up with your or your occupant’s standards?

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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 sleep monitors, or diet monitors, becoming more readily available in devices like the iPhone, or other wrist-worn devices, for instance. (1) But have you stopped to consider what role your designed architectural environments play in this type of real-time lifestyle tracking and pattern analysis?

It is important for you to ask yourself, as an architect, “How can I use clues about how my building occupant behaves to help inform the way I design for them? And how can I use such clues to make my designs better, by tapping into the more subtle nuances of their life?” Also, you should consider whether some of the clues which your environment collects about an occupant would be beneficial to share back with them, in real-time and within that same environment. Might they impact the way your occupant makes health-minded choices, for example?

It is one thing to design for a populations’ general programmatic requirements which seem to get categorized into “standard” needs…a kind of “one size fits all approach”. But you can go a step further to personalize your design, to build an environment that speaks to your occupants’ particular weaknesses and strengths — to build an environment that picks up on the nuances that will make your occupant’s life better.

Thus, you should keep an eye out for new technologies that reveal patterns in your occupant’s lifestyle or health. Just as an occupant’s allergies might make a difference in the type of materials you choose for their designed space, new types of devices are revealing new types of information about people’s lives. Be sure to use such resources to better understand people in general, to better interpret the differences which your particular occupant presents, and to help you find new ways to design environments that collect, analyze, and solve for what were previously, invisible clues.

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Reference:
(1) Nagle, Micheal. Tracking Attention, Social Activity, and Our Environment. The Measured Life. Technology Review.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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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.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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 make a positive difference in the way we live within architectural spaces. Furthermore, the research paper discusses specific ways that value can be obtained from a sensory design approach, particularly as emerging technologies continue to develop.

To learn more about how you can get access to this sensory design research paper, please click on the following link.

Click here for the Sensory Design Paper by Maria Lorena Lehman

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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

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 the information needed to allow architecture to engage in a more meaningful type of two-way dialogue between architecture and occupant — where the occupant would react and the architecture would react, but between them there would be an ongoing language in the architectural fabric that would unite them both. And it is in creating this rule-based language that your role as an architect is pivotal. For, you would be creating the thumb-print upon which that adaptive architectural language is based.

Designing an Architectural Language from the Seemingly Complex

Of course, the one thing that stresses one person may be the exact thing that relaxes another. So, how can you as an architect account for this when you are designing a building? Or furthermore an adaptive building?

The key would be to take all of the limiting factors, and come up with solutions that speak to them all by analyzing what unites them. If you try to simplify too soon, you may miss the clues within patterns that appear when looking at the more general, larger and seemingly more complex picture. But, with new technologies emerging like the wearable Q Sensor, it is becoming easier to aggregate data, and then manipulate that data to design interesting frameworks and architectural design patterns that speak to your occupants in renewed ways. For, if you gain a more in depth picture of how your occupants feel when experiencing your building design elements, you will most likely be inclined to experiment more to find what works, hone in on what is successful to built upon that, and improve your own connection with your clients — where you are able to design buildings more personally for them.

For your reference, the following is a video where you can learn more about how the Q Sensor works:

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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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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

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 exercise when they are not at the gym. The latter are just a few examples, but know for certain that there is an infinite list of the most unassuming of places where you can find gems regarding occupant behaviors.

Getting Design Inspiration from the Places You Least Expect

By keeping your eyes open, you’ll realize great ways for you, as an architect, to get not only ideas but generate breakthrough innovations that will not only help your occupants do what they already do better, but may also help them to discover new ways of doing things that they have never tried before. And with that, your architecture, and the institutional buildings that may need to be advanced, can do so by reaching out to their roots — the fundamental principles underlying what it means to serve their occupants.

So, look beyond the boundaries of the buildings that you are designing. Look beyond the boundaries of the building that have come before. Look toward those activities and behaviors that people engage in today that are occurring in the least likely of places, or times of day. Use that information, and those secrets, to energize your architecture — bringing into it new life that your occupants will love, for it will be as if you, as the architectural designer, are almost reading their mind — designing more personally for them. All of this, because you took the time to find those design clues — occupant moments, looking into their world on their terms, and incorporated that into your work in a meaningful way.

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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

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.

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 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