Image: Jan Tik | Flicker
School children's game teaches links between math and music.

As you design for your building occupant’s age, should you as a designer get more detailed and perhaps more personalized by understanding and incorporating information about your occupant’s brain age — or brain power, strengths and weaknesses between their networked connections? (1) After all, “age” as we know it today is a relative term, a catchall within which so many occupant characteristics are lumped together. But what if we as designers could incorporate new understanding about what makes up a certain age — with all of its dimensions?

Well interestingly enough, researchers are now able to gather data relating to how “mature” a brain is within a person. So no longer might you only need to think of your occupants as being a male or female that is 25 or 60. Instead, as you integrate better personalization within your adaptive sensory building designs, you can begin to design for specific brain strengths and weaknesses that your given occupant may have.

To give you a better idea of how researchers collect such data, you can read the following description as follows:

After the data were collected, the researchers fed the brain activity information for each person to a computer, which assessed hundreds of features simultaneously and spit out a score reflecting the “brain age” of the subject. This score was based on how activity in each region of the brain correlated with the activity in all the other regions. In this way, the researchers described the properties of brain connectivity for each of the 238 subjects, and constructed a curve showing how this score goes up over the years.

— From the article: Defining Normal in the Brain (1)

A Building Design that Empowers Your Occupants

Of course, when you begin to consider an occupant’s brain age, you may begin to wonder how specific and personal you should get with regard to really honing in and then tuning your building system design to your occupants. I think the question here lies in your ability to target the heart of what your building’s functions and aesthetics are aiming to do to get their occupant to their intended goals. Hence, you must figure out their purpose — and perhaps work backwards from this core design problem — using what you know about your occupant’s brain age (thus, where their brain power resides) to carve out a more tailored path where their built environment can help them when and where they need it most.

So for instance, if you are designing a school, you may need to consider what specific milestones exist for the brain maturity of your occupants/children for any given classroom. Then, in knowing what standard versus atypical brain strengths and weaknesses exist for those particular age groups, you are better equipped to design classrooms that really hone in to target not only the way those learning children perceive, but also increase their opportunities and potential for optimal learning.

As an architectural designer, you will benefit from gaining knowledge about the inner workings of your occupants in relation to your specific building types (and their purposes). One way of doing this is to know what level within their development process your occupants are in and how best to tap into their inner resources to further propel them toward their own goals.

The trick is to not bombard yourself with an overflow of design information, but to know how to use such information to not only better your designs, but to better engage and empower those occupants which they serve.

Please Tell Me What You Think

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(1) Sanders, Laura. Defining Normal in the Brain. Science News. Sept. 2010.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: midnightcomm | Flickr

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 wired technologies which give them certain capabilities; but still, they ultimately depend mostly on occupant control points — where an occupant must either go to a control device to make changes (like with a temperature thermostat), or be notified via some type of an alarm system (like a security system which may or may not be “tied” to a centralized call center to get help).

However, I think that we can take things much further, so that building communication systems do more than simply react with one-off solutions. For instance, what if a building system could use it sensors to detect patterns in occupants’ daily activities by analyzing multiple building systems at once (they could cross-talk) and then correlate those patterns with particular goals which an occupant (or architect) has specified? In this case, a building with an optimized nervous system could make better sense of those patterns to more efficiently and effectively make environmental changes for that occupant (or group of occupants) in real time.

Thus, bridging the gap between sensors and their central communication channels within a building by making more systems wireless will allow for increased opportunity by which designers can embed their sensors strategically to obtain necessary cues that might make an adaptive building work closer to its optimal potential. And, as with most wireless technologies, there will come a certain amount of added freedom for both the architect and their building occupants — if designed well.

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

Image: Oversocialized | Flickr

As the World Wide Web and social media encourage more and more digital and virtual social interactions, will the role of the architectural building system have a new place in contributing to or detracting from the way we humans interact with each other? With so so many people now using social media, I think the answer is yes.

In an article I read recently called Is a Social Crash Coming, the notion of a “hyper-connectivity” surfaces along with its ramifications in terms of human touch — or the ability for people to engage in person-to-person interactions. As an architect, I think this is a very interesting topic, especially when thinking about the role architecture has had. As an example, think of the effect of the “agora” as a Greek gathering place…it changed the dynamic of how people interrelated and behaved.

As the World Wide Web and social media make us more “present” in the minds of so many more people than ever before, I think that architectural design will need to refresh its ability to provide great focus for its occupants, by helping them to make the most of their personal face-to-face connections, while also staying current within their often global social media networks.

Buildings that “Read” You to Help You with Everyday Life

Part of this challenge will be a building’s ability to help occupants visualize and make sense of a tremendous amount of incoming information (a large part of which is coming from all of their social networks), while also helping occupants take that information from those connections that they find useful, to ultimately be able to inject what is of prime importance and relevance into their everyday real-world life.

For instance, while working in an office building an employee might be trying to work contingently on a project task at hand, while also being interrupted by numerous social media requests coming from both faraway and neighboring coworkers. In this case, an adaptive architecture could understand which interactions are happening when, and help the employee to extract information into his or her physical office for future meetings or presentations that will happen that day on location (within the office building).

Thus, the architecture could help that employee work more efficiently, with less stress and with greater foresight — as such an office might also be prompted by that employee’s social media interactions to prepare itself for upcoming brainstorming or a more formal presentation meeting at hand. Thus, the office could change itself transiently throughout the day as “virtual conversations” occur that affect the present employee’s tasks at hand.

In the end, as an architect you should keep your eye on emerging social media trends, for they are changing the way people interact both socially and professionally. And of course, architecture plays a large role in how people carry out their lifestyle design. For this reason, architectural design can be used as a social tool to help people make the most out of their many “connections”.

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 “tweeting” and “sharing” it using the buttons at the beginning of this page.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

I’m sure you like to stay in nice hotels. That personalized experience where hotel services cater to your needs is always a treat. That’s why today’s convergence technology will be really sprucing up the hotels of tomorrow — sooner than you might think.

As you will learn from the video below, building systems are being created where sensors will measure just about everything from room temperature to mold spores. That information combined with the manually controlled preferences entered by each hotel visitor will yield, as you can imagine, collected data that will be quite overwhelming in volume — particularly because it is first divided into a building’s subsystems.

That’s where convergence comes in.

By converging all of that sensory data into a central “hub”, everything will be interconnected; thus, allowing the building system to make sense of all that data.

As you watch the following video, you will understand how this is the key to enabling a more truly personalized experience — better for hotel guests, for the hotel company and (if executed correctly) for the overarching architectural design.

VIDEO: Building All the New Technology You Can into a Hotel | Sponsored by CISCO

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman