Video Summary

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 Read more

Image: R. Butler | Flickr

Along with many other innovations that are surfacing today, the Responsive Environments Group at MIT is working on a prototype that, if successful, may make the light switch a thing of the past. (1)

Their new lighting technology will be responsive by being able to adjust both lighting intensity and color balance to the specific activities that are going on within an architectural space — it would work by being able to monitor the light reading wherever a user happens to put the sensors. So for example, if you place the light sensor within the space where you usually only need task lighting, then the light will adjust accordingly, making sure that you have enough light either from natural daylight, the responsive lighting solution or some combined ratio both. (1)

While this responsive lighting innovation may sound somewhat simple in principle, it does take an interesting step toward providing a tool for greater adaptive design approaches. There are so many parts within buildings today that are static, being made to function in almost binary terms, with only “on” or “off” choices — beyond lighting, think of how static building surfaces often are: including wall surface materials, window configurations and even floor and ceiling installations.

The Power of Transience within Your Design

I think that we are in an age where the onset of new adaptive design technologies will help spaces evolve to include more dynamic and fluid behaviors — which will help to make architecture more Read more

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 Read more

When You Think of “Skin”…What’s the First Thing You Think Of?

Have you ever compared building skin to human skin? Well, with new developments like nanotechnology, smart materials and ubiquitous computing the time is ripe to revisit the inner-workings of the human body’s largest organ. After all, there is much to learn by taking a closer look at what lies beneath its surface — particularly as it relates to architecture.

What do you typically think of when you think of “building skin”? Does it primarily function to keep the exterior outside and the interior inside? Or do you use it to bring the outside in within certain parts like windows, ducts and doors? Perhaps you have a more avant-garde way of working with “skin” — using it as part of your architectural language that allows your building to communicate with both its interior and exterior at the same time.

Wherever you may be in your ideas and way of designing building skin, I’m sure that the human skin can help to reinforce and spark new ideas for your architectural designs. You might be surprised to discover that there are many similarities between these two “skins”, and in essence, they are both there to protect and to communicate.

Can Human Skin Inspire Your Designs?

For starters, I want to show you this simple video that clearly shows how the human skin operates physiologically. Now is a good time to watch this sneak peek:

Notice any similarities between what human skin needs to do and Read more

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

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

That’s where convergence comes in.

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

As you watch the following video, you will Read more