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Image: seier+seier | Flickr
Now, in the Journal of Applied Physics, researchers at Arizona State University have created a material that may be able to not only sense damage in structural materials, such as cracking in a fiber-reinforced composite, but to even heal it. The aim of developing “autonomous adaptive structures” is to mimic the ability of biological systems such as bone to sense the presence of damage, halt its progression, and regenerate itself.
-Science Daily (reprinted with adaptations from American Institute of Physics materials.
After reading the above quote, you may start to more truly understand what smart materials, and more specifically adaptive materials, are becoming capable of doing. Not only would such innovations help the building industry with the maintenance of buildings, and therefore also their safety, but they would also carve a path toward further developments leading to more sophisticated adaptive environments.
To see a quick example of how an adaptive material might work in terms of shape memory behavior, take a look at the following video of a polymer that regains its original shape once exposed over a certain temperature of its heat threshold —
While the above video may look simple enough, I invite you to consider what might develop in the future as a result of such adaptive materials as they evolve into our future environments.
Suppose for a moment that wall systems could expand and contract, pulling from different shape memories, and reacting to different stimuli that trigger their …[Read Full Article]…
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Image: mindfrieze | Flickr
Environment and behavior are linked. And since research is showing that this is the case, I think you as an architect should be aware of how your designs may spark certain behaviors in your building occupant. For instance, color has been said to impact mood, which in turn, impacts behavior. However, color is just one variable in a wide range of factors about architectural design that affect a person’s behavior.
But, can architecture do more than just create a behavior? What about changing a behavior?
There are times when a person needs to change a behavior, such as when striving to lose weight, stop smoking, eat healthier or watch less television. (You get the idea.) Well, researchers that are part of Stanford University’s Persuasive Tech Lab put together a succinct slideshow about the Top 10 Mistakes in Behavior Change — and if you think about each of the slide topics they present (shown below), you may start to imagine how an architectural environment can help its occupants to change behaviors they want to change.
Before I present you with the slideshow, I would like to point out a few things about designing an architecture that can become part of supporting a behavioral change for its occupant. Generally speaking, as an architect you should learn (in depth) about the narrative that your …[Read Full Article]…
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What if upon entering your building, you could see actual signals being sent to you from your occupants about how they feel while experiencing your building design? Would you design differently if you knew when within your building design they felt happy? Or in awe? Or stressed?
Now that technologies like the new Q Sensor (a type of bio sensor which tracks the stress levels of a person that is wearing it) are coming into play — we are in a time that is providing some very interesting opportunities for the architectural profession. For instance, you may be able to get more detailed information on what factors affect your occupant most while they take the journey through your building designs. You could potentially get to the bottom of what and why particular elements within your built space usually trigger certain reactions in your occupants. And, you could use that information to inform your design as it responds adaptively in real-time, or you could use it toward evolving your own body of architectural design works as you take what you’ve discovered into your future projects.
If used correctly to uncover emotional triggers, such a wearable bio sensor could give you quite fascinating information about your occupants likes and dislikes. And by learning from all of those occupants that are wearing these wrist worn sensors, your building may be able to adapt and modify itself to respond to the way in which they are reacting. Thus, such sensors can contribute to …[Read Full Article]…
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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 Full Article]…
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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 Full Article]…
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Image: rootoftwo | Flickr
Image: rootoftwo | Flickr
Adaptive Design:
The Dialogue Between Building and Occupant
Adaptive architecture will embody behaviors that respond to human and environmental interactions. It is with this transience that architectural space will more fully interact — or “converse” with its occupants, in grand part due to converging architectural technology.
With adaptive design, architecture will take on “motion” in new ways. A new type of “dialogue” between a building and its user will ask new things of its occupants, while feeding back dynamic and real-time sensorial stimuli.
Instead of having somewhat truncated conversations as you can experience with present-day interactive installations, the adaptive architecture of tomorrow will be able to engage in a dialogue where “feedback from the environment” takes on new meanings.
Today’s Sneak-Peeks
In their book entitled Interactive Architecture
Clearly showing how it will be possible to “construct” adaptive design spaces, they explain how “miniature robots, new material compositions, molecular geometries, robotic prototyping, atypical geometries and shape shifting-architectures” will have a profound effect on …[Read Full Article]…
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Image: woodleywonderworks | Flickr
One of the most profound and informative senses that we have is our sense of touch. This sense informs so much of the way we “see” the world around us. Some have even said that touch is the greatest of all the senses.
It is interesting to think that in some way all of our other senses engage in some form of “touch” as we experience the things which make up our environments. Thus, as we move through architectural spaces, we touch what we perceive and we perceive what we touch — we extract it, interpret it and make meaning of it in our memory and through learning. You can say that “touch” helps us to understand.
Again, touch can involve all of the senses in some way. When you touch something it has been said that you can “feel” it. One could suppose that this means that you completely take it in through the senses — to cognitively and emotionally form a perception and then an impression.
Interactivity Fosters a “Touch” Mindset
With the advancement of interactive design, architecture is becoming more responsive and ultimately adaptive. Your occupants will be paying a different kind of attention to your designs as it begins to …[Read Full Article]…
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Image: Aranda\Lasch | Flickr
Image: Aranda\Lasch | Flickr
CAPTURING FORM
A recent exhibit at Vienna’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Gallery is titled Transitory Objects where architectural forms unleashed a redefined way of perceiving architecture. Adaptive architecture can easily stem from such displays where the form is actually a moment “captured” during its dynamic process of mutation.
This results in merging both science and art to yield what we might later coin as the science of architecture. Here is a great excerpt about the Transitory Objects exhibit:
Ritchie, Oxman, Roche, and their colleagues split deeply from the finite, permanent, and utilitarian tradition of architecture. Not to say their end products are not useful or habitable. In fact, their structures are arguably better suited to the constantly morphing, impermanent, and aesthetically driven needs and desires of modern society. Rather than working with an end product or useful context in mind, they focus on the process of producing a structure that follows certain laws or principles. These resulting objects rise from computational models and algorithms whose inputs are being drawn from or at least inspired by some of the most boundary-pushing and abstract ideas in science, like quantum physics or the multiverse theory. (1)
When you think about architecture from this light, it really does unleash …[Read Full Article]…
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Image: Andreasg | Dreamstime
HEIGHTENING ARCHITECTURE’S POTENTIAL
There is no question that the design evolution of technology is skyrocketing – and having profound effects on architecture. As technology grows in processing power, it also shrinks in size, allowing for more complex uses where technology can be embedded in objects (and smart environments). Consequently, interactions between humans and technology are becoming evermore complex, and at the heart of such interactions may be the notion of rule-based systems — where sensors and actuators communicate according to rules that allow an environmental system to carry out goal-based behaviors.
HOW WILL BUILDINGS LEARN?
But, is this the only way to build smart environments in the future? In a recent article entitled The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine, the author Ray Kurzweil describes how machines are gaining speed in their ability to download complex patterns. He states that “computing technology is …[Read Full Article]…
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What if interactive architecture could do more than just react to its occupants? What if architecture was based on rules that could promote designated functions? In this light, architecture would be motivational and goal-oriented. Hospitals; for instance, would actually help patients to heal — instead of being cold and sterile, like so many hospitals we find today.
Adaptable architecture could help occupants have better experiences within buildings. For instance, within hospitals a rule-based architecture could help patients to do the following:
- understand their treatment
- reduce stress
- decrease pain
- engage in healing behavior
Hospital rooms could tailor their interactions toward certain illnesses, recovery and patient types. In addition, adaptive architecture could help the medical staff do a better job, making less medical errors. Of course, patient control and choice is important — and adaptive architecture should make provisions for both as it promotes functions within.
