Image: Averain | Flickr

Have you ever thought about how crowd mentality factors into architectural design? Well, as you can see in the photo of the Spanish Steps, there is a prime example of crowd mentality, showing what happens when a simple factor like sunlight enters the picture. Do you notice how most of the people are sitting in the shade? And have you ever thought about analyzing your building design and its site in these terms?

The exterior areas of your building design are not just “blank” masses of area that are used the same throughout. Instead you may like to think of them as exterior “rooms” where factors like light, temperature, noise, smell, texture or even wind can have a significant effect. So for instance, you may design and exterior plaza, but it may not be used in the same way throughout. Additionally, it may be used much differently from the way you originally intended.

And of course, there are those times where exterior elements just outside of buildings are used by skateboarders to perform a trick or even simply by a person trying to find the quick seat. And then you have to wonder, did the designer intended for these uses? Or where these uses mere byproducts of a different vision than the designer had?

So, when you begin to design the way your building interacts with its surrounding urban scape, consider functionalities as they may actually be used outdoors. For some reason, it seems that a seat indoors would most usually be used as a seat. Whereas a concrete seat outdoors could be used as a skateboard ramp, a table, a stage, or even a desk.

I would say the crowd mentality in exterior spaces have an ability to adapt that is quite different from the way people adapt when inside a building. There are a different set of conditions outdoors, prompting people to engage a bit differently around the built forms which surround them. And often those behaviors can spread from person to person — just as an idea can go viral.

Be sure to consider the many dimensions to your exterior building designs. Consider how different people might see them from different perspectives, and for different uses. Understand which uses you are trying to promote. And also understand where you wish to design an inherent “freedom”, where people may behave in a multitude of ways.

Such techniques will give your design and added layer of sophistication, all because you factor in crowd mentality to make the exterior of your designs just as meaningful as their interiors.

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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.

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: 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.

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: 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 information about occupant behaviors, perhaps algorithmically? Furthermore, what if you could inject this information into your building design visualization models? Hence, it would become a preview of not only what your design will look like, but also how it will function once built.

Would this pulling of occupant information allow you to spot new kinds of design errors? Would it further allow you to see aspects to your design that you otherwise did not think of, or simply missed? And in an ideal world, what other information do you wish you could pull into your architecture visualizations? What would their new capabilities allow you to “see” or “construct”?

In an age where we can easily pull data from repositories of information like the internet and other databases, new “models” can be built to help you and your firm with your architectural design processes. It is important for you to understand your current design flow, and then to be aware of what added dimensions would be most helpful to make it stronger.

The key is to “visualize” that which is almost intangible, pool from our era’s developing resources and then to implement tools that help us push architecture, as a discipline, that much further.

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 followers by “tweeting” it using the re-tweet button on this page.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: Ratoca | Dreamstime

Understanding principles about environmental psychology will help architects to design with greater awareness. The following are ten important questions inspired by some of the major themes that make up the study of environmental psychology.

Although some may look simple at first glance, the questions are really quite complex as you delve into the inner-workings of human perception, cognition and behavior. The more you understand about how occupants interact with their environments, the better your designs will be.

You should keep these questions in your “mental toolbox” as you design:

1. How do you get your occupants attention?
2. What will occupants remember most about this design?
3. How will this architecture impact their real-time experiences?
4. Is this architectural environment coherent?
5. Can this architectural environment be explored?
6. Will occupants enjoy the variety and complexity of this design?
7. Does my design promote opportunities for occupant discovery?
8. Can occupants manage and escape from stress in this environment?
9. Does my design promote healthy social interactions?
10. Is there a sense of community fostered in this architecture?

For more information about the words in italics (within the questions) read the following article about environmental psychology. Here is the link: Environmental Psychology

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

What about your designs do your occupants enjoy most? Is there anything you would have designed differently based on resulting occupant behaviors? Can you think of any other important questions that architects should be asking themselves while they design?

(1) Young, R. Environmental Psychology.. Encyclopedia of Environmental Psychology. 1998.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman