Featured Image Takeaway Design Strategy:

Have you ever thought about a building skin being used to broadcast real-time information? Perhaps it doesn’t have to be a direct broadcast, but rather an interpretation of information — a sort of architectural information visualization. The image above is simply to get you thinking about the exterior of your building skin, as an element which can pull or push data. Such data can be conveyed to occupants within or to building visitors in the exterior, or even perhaps to a surrounding community that can see or hear this broadcast. If you could do this for your project, what type of information would you want to broadcast? What type of information would you want to translate through your design? And how would you hope that it impacts your occupants and surrounding culture?

To Apply This Strategy, Ask Yourself:

Image: juhansonin | Flickr

We are currently in the midst of an information revolution which I often hear overwhelms people, particularly as they strive to solve complex problems where they need to rely on specific information to know how and when to act upon their choices in order to find a clear path toward their goal.

Often, there is so much information that those same people even have trouble trying to decipher what their best choices are in the first place. So, how is architectural design being affected by this informational influence which brings with it such overwhelm?

I think that there is information that architecture conveys through its building design elements, that if thought of differently and if presented differently, could drastically improve lifestyle for its occupants — not only to solve problems which they currently have, but to also help predict future problems that may arise, by thus, engaging with them to make healthy changes earlier-on so as to prevent those problems from ever surfacing in the first place.

It is most clearly evident that such an adaptive architectural design would have most immediate and beneficial use when engaging with an occupant’s daily habits, physiological biorhythms and other occupant-specific personalized traits.

For, it is within architecture that a sort of melting pot occurs where we have different emerging and advancing technologies that can carry out different, yet interrelated tasks — like augmented reality and ubiquitous computing which, when teamed up with other advances in areas like industrial design, can fuse not just within a building, but throughout it, to create a dynamic environment where that occupant can flourish.

For example, if an occupant is having trouble concentrating when trying to finish a task in their workspace, perhaps the sensory architecture can be designed in such a way as to promote creative thinking during certain times of day. Even more specifically, perhaps a workspace could sensorially morph dependent upon the type of work that an occupant needs to do within it, dynamically — from moment to moment. Even the most subtle of sensory building element changes can make a huge difference — and it is upon these types of details that occupant lifestyle is built.

Pulling from “Unused” Information to Improve Occupant Environments

You can see in the following video lecture, entitled It’s Time to Redesign Medical Data (presented by Thomas Goetz), that already there is thought being given to simplifying informational complication to help alleviate people’s lives. In the case of this lecture, Goetz proposes a re-design of medical blood test data which is usually given to doctors to translate back to their patients.

Instead, he argues that such information should be Read more

Image: swimparallel | Flickr

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 Read more

Image: Ben Chau | Flickr

Throughout your architectural design process it is often the case that you need different tools at different points in time as you design. While some tools help you to visualize what goes on during your personalized architecture process, others help you to visualize what will go on within your final building design. So, what happens when these two worlds start to merge? Will your design visualizations be as immersive as the actual methods you use to communicate your designs to clients and other team members?

At different phases during your design process you explore different things. You engage in different levels of refinement and you solve an array of problems and questions that all have project-wide consequences and effects. You probably use a combination of both digital media information visualizations and 3D modeling methods. In fact, many architects today are delving into 4D information modeling techniques involving BIM leading-edge tools.

Whatever the case, it is paramount that your digital media design tools help to streamline your own architecture process. And a key to this is to make sure these tools are intuitive and promote creative thinking.

Digital Media Tools that Dig into the Minds of Your Occupants

Design project tools that reduce redundancy, error and cost during your architectural design process can go a long way toward increasing the quality and reducing the cost of your building — while also increasing the actual speed with which you can design. But there are a few things that come to mind when questioning how these tools can evolve, to get even better.

What if your architectural design tool could also help you extract Read more

Image: Sensing Architecture from Wordle

I just couldn’t resist! I had to try out Wordle — a new site where one can create their own word clouds based on inputted data. In fact, I created a Sensing Architecture Wordle word cloud (as you can see in the image found within this post). Wordle presents just one form of information visualization; however, new ways of seeing information are beginning to surface all over – and they are making sense of greater and greater complexity.

Places like Visual Complexity.com host a wide variety of examples where information has been simplified in visual form. Visit this site — it is quite interesting to see the wide variety of different information types that have been made visual. They have examples ranging from particle systems to music tracks … You should check it out!

Such information visualizations will appear in many places as their simplicity will be quite valued. Look for their emergence within buildings as designers Read more