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Image: -Marlith- | Flickr
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 Read more
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Image: aloshbennett | Flickr
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 Read more
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Video Summary
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 Read more
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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
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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 Read more
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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 Read more
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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 Read more
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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.
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 Read more
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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 Read more
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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 more
