If a building can provide real-time feedback to assist with promoting positive behaviors, do you think it would be a good idea to design such a building? You see, the implications to designing such a building are many. For instance, notions of privacy, control, and determining what positive behaviors to promote all feed into what might make such a building challenging to build.

Nevertheless, we can already see feedback being used to promote behaviors during regular daily life. For example, your car lets you know how fast you’re going, how much gas you have left, and whether or not you’ve forgotten to put your seatbelt on. In the case of the car, its feedback mechanisms target letting you know how to engage in positive behaviors that keep you and your car safe. Plus, the issues of privacy and control are all dealt with seamlessly.

For a building that is adaptive in its design, it could sense aspects like occupant mood and behavior, from which it could detect patterns — to determine desired outcomes, goals, and/or experiences seeked out by occupants. And in doing so, it could feedback to its occupants with important and timely information to help trigger positive behaviors.

Such positive behaviors could be to exercise more, to watch less tv, to eat healthier, to go to bed earlier for a better night’s sleep, or to become more productive by working smarter and multi-tasking less. Really, the behaviors that are deemed positive and worthy of being an occupant goal might all be embedded within the adaptive building’s fabric. Thus, what the building feedsback via its environmental stimuli would target helping occupants achieve such positive behaviors to reach their goals.

So, to answer the initial question which this article began with: Can Building feedback help to increase positive occupant behaviors? I think that if designed well, then the answer is yes. However, much care should be given to ensure that the building is targeting what the occupant wants to achieve, along with any predetermined safety measures as determined by the architect.

In the end, such an adaptive building could really help to improve occupang lifestyle, health, and happiness. The key is to make certain that the building’s feedback is in fact helping them positively. If designed well, I think that there is much that could be accomplished with such an architecture.

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There are many times on this site where I write about new sense technologies that are evolving and making their way into the mainstream, and I often encourage you as an architect to think about unique and creative ways that you can integrate this technology into your design to make it better for your occupants — this is a distinction from simply using technology “just for the sake of using it”, but rather to use it when the time and place is appropriate so it can bring newfound innovation to your design vision.

There are other times in many of my articles where I discuss incorporating a “just-in-time” design intervention, where you strategically place something within your design to improve the lives of your occupants at just the right moment — such as helping them to achieve a goal. Now, this is important because when you unite the power of what sense technologies can do with this notion of a “just-in-time intervention”, you have the ability to engage with your occupant in real time, and if done in the right way you can really make a positive difference in your occupants’ life.

See a “Just-In-Time” Design Intervention in Action

In the following video, you will see a design group demonstrating what can happen when technology and design ingenuity merge. You will see a simple, yet great example of a “just-in-time intervention”, where this group of designers have transformed a simple staircase that sits next to an escalator — all in hopes of seeing if they can get more people to use the stairs instead of the escalator. Of course, this would create a positive impact on those that use the stairs, since they would gain potential health benefits due to more daily exercise or even potential increase in speed in getting from point A to point B. Nevertheless, I think this video is a “must see” because it shows you very clearly how technology can be integrated into environments to really change and make positive impact on the way people live.

The following is the video called “Piano Stairs”:

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Fun that Sense Technologies Bring

As you can see in the video, there is also a certain element of fun that the designers had when executing this project. And that is not a bad thing. There are times where the element of fun can also be used to boost the way you incorporate sense technologies and such “just-in-time” interventions — making them more appealing to your building occupants, capturing more of their attention, focus and tapping into their inner motivations.

While it is good to always assess the more serious sides to architectural or occupant problems, do not underestimate the power of incorporating “play” in your design. If done correctly, in an elegant and ingenious manner, the element of play will take you and your occupants far as it has the power to help your architecture better connect with its occupants — thus increasing its power to better be able to help your occupants.

So, be sure to think back to this video example when, for instance, you might be trying to encourage a particular building occupant behavior. Use your building design as a vehicle by which you can invite your occupants to engage. And do not forget that you can appeal to a multitude of their senses to do so, including their sense of play and fun, if presented at just the right time.

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The two: building and occupants, have an unparalleled relationship where each adapts to the other over time and in different ways — and as new technologies, and in particular gesture technology, makes its way into the forefront, I think that buildings will be able to communicate with occupants through more natural, nonverbal and real-time cues.

For this reason, by not only observing communication gestures, but by also making use of them, you will be able to create architecture that not only better adapts to your occupants as their daily needs change, but you will also be able to enhance your own design skillset as you will better understand your client’s and occupants’ behavioral signals, so you can envision architectural solutions for them that they may not be able to articulate verbally.

There is an entire design fabric that you can acquire by simply understanding nonverbal communication elicited by your occupants as they inhabit built environments. In other words, occupants have behaviors and habits which can help you optimize your current design visions — and help you formulate renewed design visions that are innovative, improving upon present-day conventions about what we think occupants do in building designs.

Understanding Occupant Behaviors Using Communication Gestures

An open-source gesture technology which has surfaced is a glove within which is embedded an accelerometer, and from which information can be gathered and coupled with computer scripts, which link the wearer’s communication gestures to move such things as robotic objects. (1) While I do not see a future where all building occupants are always wearing such gloves to remotely control or interact with all of the objects within their surroundings, I do see certain uses where architecture can give occupant gestures meaning, particularly naturally occurring and/or intentional gestures.

For instance, many buildings today have lights that turn on and off automatically depending upon when and where an occupant enters into a room. As such, I can perceive a future where such natural and simple occupant behaviors (like walking into or exiting a room) within a building are used to develop environments which adapt more personally and more transiently to occupant needs at just the right moments within their experiential journey. The key here is to not overlook the naturally occurring communication gestures that occupants inherently emit as they go about their daily lives, even the simple and often overlooked ones, for these can be just as useful to you as a designer as their more obvious and purposefully-driven hand or body gesture signals.

How Everyday Objects Can Tie Architecture to the Human Body

Now, as new ways continue to develop for architecture to communicate with its occupants through more natural interfaces, I do see objects within architectural environments being used as a powerful intermediary between building and human body. And as more mobile and ubiquitous sensing technologies are embedded within everyday objects (such as furniture, lighting, appliances, and hand-held objects) the collective amount of information gathered will be able to communicate behavioral clues about an occupant. Thus, everyday objects are a means by which architecture can “interpret” its occupants’ behaviors. And from these, the building may respond accordingly.

Either way, the key becomes to design your buildings in a way that renews, with meaning, the relationship between a building and its occupants — whether they be communication gestures that are sensed through objects within an environment, observed as natural occupant body movements or even accessed through wearable sensors which monitor occupant behaviors.

The key is for you as an architect to not overlook the nuances in your occupants’ behaviors — not only focusing on the big things like when and where they sleep, eat, and work, but also by focusing on the little things like how they like to re-energize while working as compared to while exercising. Another aspect to consider is how your occupants communicate with each other nonverbally as they carry on with their daily functions. You can even take this a step further by looking at nuances in your occupants’ behavior when they see something of beauty — noticing what inspires them, tires them or teaches them.

Needless to say, as an architect there may be times where you need to act as a detective to unravel the nonverbal language which your occupants reveal, for there is likely great inspiration and knowledge within those nonverbal communication gestures from which you can draw more beautiful and innovative architectural designs that are equally unique as they are universal.

Citation:

(1) Covert, Adrian. Open-Source, Accelerometer-Equipped Glove Allows for Infinite Control Possibilities. PopSci.com. July 9, 2009

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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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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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Image: Samuel Mann | Flickr

Sometimes it might be hard for occupants to really visualize their actions as they execute them. While not all actions need to be visualized, there are some interactions that could very well help occupants if they could better understand them as they occur. So, what in built environments could provide occupants with such insight, so as to give them real-time feedback on the key actions which they take? Could visualizations like these help them to live healthier? Be more productive? Have more fun? Learn better? Heal better?

In the following video, you will see a person simply moving through a space, and as they move, their actions are having some effect on a nearby interactive wall where there is an entire world of dynamic graphics composed to mirror their walking style. What is within this video is conceptually quite a simple premise. Yet, you can take some of the ideas within it to new heights, as you begin to interchange walking for other key occupant actions that may need to be mirrored — like someone working in their office trying to brainstorm, or a teacher with their students who are trying to learn.

Here is the video, so you can take a look:

In the end, occupants leave their thumbprint upon a building just as much as the building leaves their impression upon its occupants. Both occupant and building must work together in harmony, and I think that if occupants could better visualize through their senses, about how their interactions within a space are carrying out through a narrative — then for those key moments that need to be mirrored, a building may better be able to help them reach their intended goals. For, each occupant has a unique thumbprint, and each action they take will yield certain results, some of which may be too complex for them to visualize without some help.

So, it is time to give more meaning to the way building interaction designs help their occupants. The key is to find those unique moments within their daily narratives where it would help them to receive cues, visualizations and prompts — which could support them, teach them, inspire them, or even give them better options. So think about what your building might “say” to your occupants. What does it say to them? And when? But most importantly, …Why? What is the interaction’s purpose — from the occupant’s point of view. Give meaning to interactions, do not just make things move when occupants move, simply because they can. Make them something of meaningful value for your occupants.

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Image: ralphbijker | Flickr

When we experience space by traveling through it, we interact with it affecting its acoustical behaviors in what can be unintentional ways — but what if an architectural design could make its occupants think more carefully about how they move through built space, where their movements yield more intentional acoustic behaviors? Instead of aural experience always being something that seems to happen in the background (from an occupant’s perceptual point of view), why not make it a part of the interplay between building and occupant that not only informs occupants, but also promotes enjoyment, awareness, and/or goal oriented cues.

Of course, within architectural space there is rarely just one person that occupies it. So often, occupants must make use of collaboration and teamwork, as well as help to foster a sense of community and enjoyment while engaging interactively within a building. Take, for instance, a museum where visitors may be educated by exhibitions both individually and through interactive collaborative learning moments. Within such a building, exhibits might use tools like what you will see in the following video, where interactive musical instruments can be coordinated on the fly by willing participants. I think this has merit because if this concept were to be taken further, museum visitors would have more of an immersive and social cooperative learning experience about a subject — where they could draw their own learning conclusions, work toward a goal, and learn from others as they work together with them in real-time. To give you a basic idea of how such an interactive collaborative design might work, take a look at this video:

How Acoustic Behavior Can Expand Spatial Boundaries

As you can see, occupants can take a more proactive role in “tuning” their own built environment in real time. For instance, what if a similar installation were to be located in a school to yield a new type of performance which students could literally create. Suddenly, their actions within a given space could help them to engage with not only themselves and their instrument, but also their fellow classmates who are also playing an instrument. So, once their collective abilities reached a certain level, their musical performance could be broadcast within a certain area of the school (or room) so they could take pride in what they have achieved, entertain their fellow classmates, and also entice them to come and create their own musical masterpieces, which they, too, can broadcast once they reach a certain level (or goal). Thus, collective interactive sensorial experiences can help individuals greatly. Just think interactive sensorial teamwork learning — and you can substitute the subject of music for a variety of other subjects as well.

In the end, I think it is quite interesting that an architectural space, when leveraging its sensorial stimuli, can use occupant actions and interplay to stimulate their independent thinking through collective intelligence. What other applications like this might you embed within your design work? And how might your final built environments elevate the level of thinking, interplay and community for its occupants?

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Image: sergis blog | Flickr

The Digital Water Pavilion in Zaragoza, Spain dismissed the notion of using glass for the boundaries which mark the “separation” between the interior and the exterior. To make it even more interesting, this pavilion drops a sheet of water around its perimeter in a curtain-like fashion, but when it senses the movement and approach of a body that wishes to enter — it uses sensors to stop releasing water so as to create a portal through which a person can gain entrance into the pavilion. Yes, an early form of fluidity in action.

Carlo Ratti, the Digital Water Pavilion’s architect, uses choreography and “sensing” to bring the notions of entrance, boundary and threshold into new realms — and much of this is achieved by taking advantage of a very common material…water. He does this by creating an architectural space that takes a step toward what I call a “fluid-bridging effect”.

The Fluid-Bridging Effect

Much like a simple window screen that keeps certain elements out (insects), allows certain elements in (wind) and unveils a portal from the opposite site (for viewing), the water in Ratti’s Pavilion design gives life to a “moving wall” which bridges the exterior and interior in a real-time transient manner.

This “fluid bridge” unites these two worlds at different times and in different locations giving access, entry and view all triggered and sustained by motion. In this case, motion creates a void to allow for a fluid bridge. In other words, a connection that is in motion.

Fluidity and sensing go hand in hand for the architecture of tomorrow. In fact, you already have the tools to put these in effect today. I challenge you to look at the simple materials we all take for granted. Turn the way they work and what they are aimed to do upside-down.

Be conscious of their limitations and then imagine what would happen if a particular limitation didn’t exist. What would it allow you to achieve? Furthermore, what if you could merge two materials and then adjust the percentage of which material properties carry through to the hybrid? What would this new hybrid material allow your occupants to do? What would it allow your building to do?

Simply think beyond boundaries, and then create new ones.

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Individual atoms in a 90 nanometer scoop of Nitinol.
Image: jurvetson | Flickr

Why does inspiration strike when thinking about building design in terms of a convergent assembly of elements? Well, here is an explanation about just what a “convergent assembly” means for manufacturing at the molecular level.

Todays manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. [...] One robotic arm assembling molecular parts is going to take a long time to assemble anything large — so we need lots of robotic arms: this is what we mean by massive parallelism. While earlier proposals achieved massive parallelism through self replication, today’s “best guess” is that future molecular manufacturing systems will use some form of convergent assembly. In this process vast numbers of small parts are assembled by vast numbers of small robotic arms into larger parts, those larger parts are assembled by larger robotic arms into still larger parts, and so forth. If the size of the parts doubles at each iteration, we can go from one nanometer parts (a few atoms in size) to one meter parts (almost as big as a person) in only 30 steps.

- zyvex.com, Introduction to the Core Concepts of Molecular Nanotechnology

The Future of Scalability in Architecture

As if to build upward from some sort of DNA structure, building an assembly of parts at smaller scales then fitting that assembly within a larger assembly give should give you “food for thought”.

What if, as an architect, you could design a sort of “DNA seed” from which your buildings would grow, not only as they are built, but also as they age over time? Could your initial design “seed” create a better outcome for your building during it’s use — especially in its later years? Well, this “seed” approach definitely calls for designing a building system with a different design mindset — a sort of “genetic” approach to design execution.

In other words, your notion of “scalability” would directly impact your final product, which would be more of a real-time rule-based system. It would be an architecture that appears to grow. Certainly different from the architecture we see today.

I challenge you to think of your building’s system in a slightly different way. In the future, it will be more than just a system made up of parts that come together at scales that you can easily “see” in one glimpse, but as a system with the power to mold itself into an almost infinite array of possibilities — but where your design vision sets its inherent order. Hence, I am speaking of a more adaptive building system approach.

But still, today we typically build a “what you see, is what you get” architecture. Instead, I see that we are at the advent of having more “genetic” building systems.

Building and assembling at the molecular level certainly brings with it some challenges, especially as the iterative process of scaling the manufacturing process upward needs to be resolved. Similarly, architects must work to design their building system from extreme detail to the scale that encompasses global and cultural concerns.

Nevertheless, your building sits upon your design ideas as it reacts to its own surrounding environment. Your design vision and execution becomes your building’s fingerprint from which it adapts, behaves and stands strong.

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Visualization of a hand in motion during a conversation
Image: jeanbaptisteparis | Flickr

Motion sensors are already all around us, they exist in certain appliances, mobile phones and even within your car — but what if nanotechnology and the miniaturization of these sensors down to the nano scale could have profound impact on the buildings in which we live?

With nanotechnology, development is in the works to make sensors 100 times more sensitive than sensors we have today. Here is a quote explaining this remarkable feat:

“Able to “feel” and sense the movement of individual atoms, the researchers’ new MEMS sensing device uses small carbon tubes, nano in size — about one-billionth of a meter long. Creating these tiny tubes using a process involving methane gas and a furnace, Prof. Hanein has developed a method whereby they arrange themselves on a surface of a silicon chip to accurately sense tiny movements and changes in gravity.”

- from phsorg.com, A More Sensitive Senor Using Nano-sized Carbon Tubes

The question now becomes, how can you as an architect make use of such significant advances in order to improve and uplift the lives of your occupant? And yes, I do believe that uplifting the lives of your occupants should be a primary focus for your work as an architect. Nevertheless, it is time to think outside of the box.

Where Would You Embed a Nano Motion Sensor?

Since MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) will be not only more sensitive, but also a lot smaller, your designs can make use of their ability to sense very slight motion. For instance, with architectural kinetic installations, perhaps your components which are in motion could respond to an array of different triggers — like the way someone walks up the stairs, into a room, or even the way someone sits and repositions themselves in a chair. Thus, an entire architectural space could respond to such slight human behaviors.

Very slight motion could revolutionize architecture, as its elements would be able to react more sensitively to a multitude of variables like wind, earth activity, water, fire, weathering and more subtle occupant behaviors. With nano sized motion sensors an architectural design could go from a more reactive state to an almost predictive state; where when time is of the essence, buildings could be safer. Hospitals, for instance, could treat their patients more effectively.

But that’s not all.

Perhaps offices could be better ergonomically designed as slight movements in the way an employee works at their desk or talks on the phone could prompt certain office components and new materials to foster a happier, healthier, more effective and productive working lifestyle. Similarly, nano motion sensors could detect the activity on a teacher’s and/or student’s desk to then actuate certain designed elements within a classroom to facilitate better teaching and learning.

I challenge you, as an architect, to think beyond the scope of where technology is today — to take into account even the slightest variations of your occupant’s behaviors, because it is in those details that you will often be able to more truly optimize your design vision.

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman