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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 narrative of the surgical process for both the doctor and patient. Not only do a team of medical staff need to operate within a confined space for what can sometimes be a very long time doing highly concentrated and delicate work, but they also need to respond to what can seem to be redundant typical procedures that have the potential for variation.

It is in this variation that I think architectural design and its integrated technologies can help by really boosting the collective power of the medical team by, first and most simply, making complex practices and decisions simpler. This in effect will do two things: (1) medical procedures will be carried out more quickly, and (2) medical procedures will be carried out with greater quality by ensuring less of a chance for error. And should there be an error, a good design of the immediate surrounding environment can “foster and promote” thorough and immediate responses.

Sticking with our operating room example, you might begin to imagine what a technology like an interactive holograph can do within such a complex space. If such a holograph can be experienced by the surgeon to help him or her carry out a specific procedure within the surgery, they might have a guide to keep them focused, and alerted to any current or potential problems that could arise. For instance, a holograph could make a 3-D spatial representation of incoming data about current patient bodily functions and fluctuations while simultaneously making sense of what the medical team is doing (and will need to do), and can compare all of that to previous surgeries of the same type to serve as a benchmark for different steps within that process. This holograph could be visible during the surgery and the medical team could look behind or around the 3D representations being displayed — as might need to be done when operating within the body, which can be difficult to see or visualize, particularly as each patient’s body can be different.

Similarly, adaptive architecture can learn from such examples as the interactive holograph. In fact, the two can work together to really make built space not only more functional, but simpler for the occupant to understand and thereby use. In effect, this will result in an occupant being able to make faster decisions that are usually correct, while also empowering them with time they might need to place their attention where it is most needed.

I think there are lessons to be learned from the interactive holograph — not only from its potential for use to help solve complex problems, but in how interactive architecture can make those complex problems easier for occupants, for that is a way for you to think about designing the most demanding of spaces, by using design to interface between occupant’s thoughts, behaviors and their tools.

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© 2008-2010 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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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.

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© 2008-2010 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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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 augmented reality where someone using the technology can simply visualize an action through thought, and thus, create consequential behaviors in a virtual world, but it can also improve interactions in real-life applications by enhancing a user’s thinking power as they engage with their surroundings. Think smart buildings here.

Just imagine that within your own home you could use your thoughts to visualize how you would like a certain lighting condition to change, window glass to change in transparency or the temperature of a room to change by simply imagining the action that you would like to see carried out. Although at this point some of this may seem quite “magical”, there is a very real potential for this to not only work, but to have profound and positive life-changing benefits for those that not only use it, but need it. (What this can do for accessibility within buildings could potentially change the canvas of where we are today.)

Getting this “Magical” Headset to Sync with Other Building Systems

However, such a brain computer does not eliminate the need for transient architecture to look for other cues, and continue to develop its mechanisms within its own systems for making sense of incoming data. And of course, an adaptive building system must take into account more cues than just those found within an occupant’s visualization powers and within the behavior of the objects within their building environment. Also, adaptive architecture must also take into account things like external environmental conditions, and the needs of both a collective body of occupants as well as those needs of only an individual. It must synchronize with all of these.

Taking all of this into account, I do think that this Emotiv Systems brain computer interface is definitely making some steps toward thinking outside the box. As more ways for occupants to interact with their built environment come into the forefront, adaptive architecture will be that much better because it will be able to make more sense of a building occupant’s goals, with a more seamless approach on how to get them there.

The following is a video where Tan Le, the head of Emotive Systems, explains how this brain computer interface technology works. Within this video you will see a live demonstration which is quite amazing to watch, and no doubt, you will immediately be struck by other ideas on how this headset technology will impact architectural design through more far-reaching applications.

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© 2008-2010 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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So much of our time as architects is spent thinking and designing for projects that live on land, but what about architecture that lives on water? What if you had to design a human dwelling that is not only near the water, but actually in it?

Change a Major Variable…Like the Site

One would think that if you are an architect solely designing for buildings on land it would be a waste of time to think about what it would take to design them on water. But have you considered that by thinking about a design on water, you may actually come up with more innovative design solutions to many of the problems that arise when trying to design for land? For instance, in the following video you will see a hotel design concept that shows a hotel visitor’s room underwater — where you will see their bed, dresser and a couch (just like in a typical hotel room might have).

However, within this “underwater hotel”, a visitor could literally lay in bed and see a complete panorama of the underwater world floating above, as a canopy surrounding their bed. Can you imagine what it would be like to be a visitor there, falling asleep while watching fish and other sea life swim by? I know they say that fish tanks are relaxing, but what about sleeping beneath the ocean?

Kidding aside, by completely changing the type of site you design for, you will begin to think about architecture for your occupants’ experience in entirely new ways. On land, what if you design a room where your occupants could sleep under the stars (instead of beneath the ocean)? What would that be like for them?

To get you thinking out of the box, you can watch the following video showing various floating architectural structures that have been conceptually developed by architects. All of these designs involve architecture that floats (or is submerged) within the ocean. And while some do not seem to quite “work” there are others that may give you some food for thought.

Remember this: To reach a truly innovative design, change your perspective often.

Here is the video that may make you rethink what it means to “dwell”:

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© 2008-2010 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: Verino77 | Flickr

New technologies are emerging like smart windows that are not only making it more energy efficient and cheaper for occupants to run their smart building systems during different seasons of the year, but are providing a way to make occupants feel more comfortable as well.

There is a new smart window on the market which is described as “tunable” in that it would give people a way to control how much light and heat come in through that window. The key here is that the smart window allows for occupants to make light and heat adjustments independently from each other. So for example, an occupant would be able to let heat in while simultaneously blocking out the light. This might be good in winter months, for example. (For more of a description about how these new smart windows work, you can check out the Technology Review article here.)

What Will Make “Tunable” Design Elements Desirable?

Such new smart windows are a good sign because they are showing that the idea of something being “tunable” is slowly becoming possible. Of course, the word “tunable” is really a catchall phrase that I am using to describe how an architectural feature can fluctuate between a spectrum of “positions” as can be chosen, either directly or indirectly, by the occupant in real-time. You see, heading in this direction will allow for more personalization and efficiency for both the occupant and the building. Plus, occupants are likely to experience heightened comfort as well.

In addition to a smart window, another architectural feature that I think would benefit from being “tunable” is interior lighting. By being able to choose between different lighting types within one fixture, an occupant might have more variability from which to choose, so they could get more appropriate lighting to meet their given task at any moment in time.

In short, such architectural transience would allow occupants to work and play in healthier conditions, and with greater building efficiency. “Tunability” is one small step toward an adaptive architecture which will be able to respond with not just “one-size-fits-all” kind of design solutions, but instead will be able to respond by selecting from the best choice of a wide spectrum of options that it can provide.

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© 2008-2010 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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When it comes to architectural design, most emphasis is placed on what happens within buildings while occupants are awake, active and being productive as they engage in their wide range of daily human behaviors. But as an architect, you must step back and ask yourself what makes all of this activity and behavior possible for your occupants? What helps them to maintain their proper amount of focus and energy while also being creative and productive as they engage in their daily activities — even down to a physiological level.

Well, a critical and important factor which helps humans to perform optimally is none other than sleep. And where is this mostly carried out? In homes, in hospitals, in hotels and even less obvious places like boarding schools.

While achieving good design in all of these places is important in terms of helping occupants with their everyday wakeful tasks and activities, it is also important for you to know that REM sleep during the night is critically important for your occupants to achieve in order to help make not only their overall health better, but also to maximize their function and outlook for the next day like creativity, productivity and so on.

Quote from Science Daily article entitled Memory Researchers Explain Latest Findings on Improving the Mind:

“REM sleep is important for pulling together all the information we process on a daily basis and turning it into memories we can use later,” said Mednick. “This helps us to understand more about the benefits of sleep and to help people maximize their sleep schedules for optimal productivity in memory retrieval.”

How Might You Design for a Better Night’s Sleep?

When you think about adaptive architecture, you need to engage in the narrative and processes that make up your occupants’ daily lives — and then, within your design you need to not only account for their routine schedules, but also allow for variations within those schedules. Just as proper lighting is important within your design to harmonize with your occupants circadian rhythm, the olfactory, aural and touch senses can also be used within architectural design to help get your occupants to that deeper level of REM sleep during the night.

For starters, as an architect you may need to look at what obstacles are preventing your occupants from sleep and then get rid of those. Within a hospital, for instance, it is reported that good sleep is very difficult for patients to achieve because of the rolling carts in the hallways and the opening and closing of room doors during nightly patient checks. By just finding solutions for these seemingly simple problems, you as an architect can greatly contribute to helping those patients heal faster and better by simply giving them a better quality of rest during the night.

Within a hotel, we see a lot more option in terms of comfort than might typically exist within a hospital design. Within a hotel room an occupant might experience nice lighting to help them read a good book before bed, a well-placed television in case they need a distraction before sleeping, darkening curtains and filtering room shades to help prevent street light (or early morning light) from streaming into the room and waking the occupant up. And also, part of getting a good night’s sleep might be in the preparation — at some hotels, they provide nice robes, slippers or a “good night” snack simply to create a relaxation kind of mood.

As an architect, you should take the time to get to know your future building occupants — knowing not only what they do during the day, but also what they need to do to prepare for the night, and to achieve a good and restful night of sleep. Do not waste this incredible way to leverage your design talents. For, what good is the most amazing architectural design that can help your occupant be highly proactive during the day, if they are just too tired to make good use of it because a poor design helped them to get a restless night of sleep. Don’t let your design fall short.

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© 2008-2010 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”.

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© 2008-2010 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

New technologies like mobile laser scanners are making it easier to capture greater detail of real-life 3D space in a fraction of the time it would normally take to mentally deconstruct, document and virtually render those spaces for either architectural contract documents or for an architectural visualization. Such technologies, as they advance, are helping architects to bring back to the office what they observe on the field — particularly helpful if working to design a project which involves demolition, restoration or an addition.

In a recent article I read entitled Laser-Loaded Backpack Creates Instant 3D Model Interiors, researchers at UC Berkeley are said to be developing and testing a prototype for a mobile backpack of laser scanners that now can help people to very quickly document detailed aspects of a building’s interior by simply walking through it with a backpack on (this high-tech backpack will do the scanning). In the article the author also pointed out that similar to Google Earth’s GPS system which now documents street-level views of buildings and other aspects of urban landscape, mobile laser scanners are enabling us with a way to record interiors. And as was suggested in the article, perhaps just about all spaces can potentially become virtually accessible with this new streamlined and easy to use technology. (And just as we can see most any exterior street space via the Internet today, it could soon be possible to also walk inside any one of those virtual buildings to see the detailed interior to that space).

A New Way to “Pocket” Architectural Impressions in a Flash

I think that such mobile laser scanners will become a major advantage for architects, as it will be a quick way to go to an existing site and not only “pocket” those impressions which we can take back to the office for later design analysis, but also virtually recreate precise measured recordings that we can further put into digital software programs like AutoCAD and other drafting/3D-rendering tools. Furthermore, I think that as digital media tools for architects continue to advance, we will have greater capabilities by which to not only visualize future built environments, but we will also have greater capability by which to re-create existing real-world environments in virtual form — upon which we can make smoother, quicker and more beautiful changes as we build upon them. Needless to say, such mobile laser scanning advances also serve to help record history of existing historic buildings which are either deteriorating and need a face-lift, or simply need to be recorded in order to create virtual architectural collective memories.

On the one hand, the ability to scan the environment and document its every detail for later interpretation in design can really save you as an architect a lot of time and money while also providing a more realistic representation back at the office upon which you can build your vision. But on the other hand, you should be careful that such realistic and quick representations do not restrict your work by not allowing you to “see” beyond what is already there. In the end, such digital technologies are your tools, and when used wisely can certainly push the design paradigm of your work. However when working, be sure that you are not limited by the speed and reality of such scanned images that virtually appear before you, for when designing upon the history of what once was or currently is, you should look beyond your tools to realize the potential of what you can make it become.

The following video is an example of how mobile laser scanners are able to help building designers at various steps within their design process:

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© 2008-2010 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

There is very interesting research going on right now which is indicating that there could be neural connections in the brain “between the senses (hence, sensorial stimuli) and intense memories”. (1)

Instinctively, do you this such connections exist? Have you ever listened to a song and instantly been transported back to a certain time and place in your memory that this song seems to be unexplainably linked to? Or have you ever walked into a room that has a certain smell which instantly reminds you of an experience you had a long time ago? Or what about seeing something that triggers your memory, reminding you of a conversation you once had or a place you once visited? And in each case, did an emotion surface as a result of the sensorial memory trigger? Well, such is the research by neuroscientist Benetto Sacchetti which focuses on those possible “links” which are like narrow bridge-like connections tying together emotional memory and the senses.

If there were such a neural “link”, what would this mean for you as an architect and your building design? Would you purposefully embed certain smells in a school to encourage comforting home-like emotional ease to help foster learning? Or might you play certain sounds (or songs) while at work to help boost productivity and/or creativity to yield more frequent and better quality results with less stress?

It is important for you to realize that such positive outcomes can result from the materials and other sensorial stimuli you put into your buildings — especially in the details. Thus, certain material properties, lighting displays and even geometric architectural arrangements are likely to serve as acute triggers for powerful emotions in occupants. Through their senses and into their emotional memory, you can think of the effect of an inspirational museum or a touching memorial where architectural moments lead visitors on a journey through their senses and into their emotional memory.

In other words, as an architect, you need to understand that what you put in, you will get out…and this will have either a positive or negative effect (with consequences) for your occupant.

Of course, designing to purposely trigger memory can be a tricky thing, and some may say that it is an art to be able to do this well — and at a high level. So, even if there is a definitive link between the senses and emotional memories which they may bring to the surface, I think it is your job as an architect to act as a surgeon at times, knowing how to extract and guide those memories within your designs, so they can resurface, form, be realized, felt and appreciated by your occupants.

As an architect, with the right ingredients, you can create such a vessel — delivering the right environmental stimuli to the senses, and thus, triggering not only memory, but also profound emotion.

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(1) Found: Possible Link Between Emotional Memories and Sensory Triggers. Discover.

© 2008-2010 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: visualpanic | Flickr

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 a patient rehabilitate and prepare for their transition when they go from their hospital room to home. Of course, the projection would need to be tailored to the specifics of their particular situation.

Using sensing and projecting technologies to help occupants reconnect with their bodies can do great things for their mind and spirit as well. After all, feeling the wind blow through your hair on a beautiful day might be a bit out of reach for someone in a hospital room. Such technologies might be a great way to bring a unique piece of the nature outside right into the room where they can experience it for themselves.

Here is a video showing Motion Texture in action:

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© 2008-2010 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman