Inhabiting Adaptive Architecture

Adaptive Architecture concerns buildings that are specifically designed to adapt to their inhabitants and to their environments. Work in this space has a very long history, with a number of adaptive buildings emerging during the modernist period, such as Rietveld’s Schröder house, Gaudi’s Casa Batlló and Chareau's Maison de Verre. Such early work included manual adaptivity, even if that was motor-assisted. Today, buildings have started to combine this with varying degrees of automation and designed-for adaptivity is commonplace in office buildings and eco homes, where lighting, air conditioning, access and energy generation respond to and influence the behaviour of people, and the internal and external climate

Adaptive Architecture:Regulating human building interaction

In this paper, we explore the regulatory, technical and interactional implications of Adaptive Architecture (AA) and how it will recalibrate the nature of human-building interaction. We comprehensively unpack the emergence and history of this novel concept, reflecting on the current state of the art and policy foundations supporting it. As AA is underpinned by the Internet of Things (IoT), we consider how regulatory and surveillance issues posed by the IoT are manifesting in the built environment. In our analysis, we utilise a prominent architectural model, Stuart Brand’s Shearing Layers, to understand temporal change and informational flows across different physical layers of a building. We use three AA applications to situate our analysis, namely a smart IoT security camera; an AA research prototype; and an AA commercial deployment. Focusing on emerging information privacy and security regulations, particularly the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016, we examine AA from 5 perspectives: physical & information security risks; challenges of establishing responsibility; enabling occupant rights over flows, collection, use & control of personal data; addressing increased visibility of emotions and bodies; understanding surveillance of everyday routine activities. We conclude with key challenges for AA regulation and the future of human–building interaction

Using adaptive architecture to support yoga practices: social considerations for design

The field of Adaptive Architecture aims to design built environments, which truly adapt to their occupants. ExoBuilding is an in-house prototypical example of Adaptive Architecture, which actuates in response to breathing and heart- rate of its occupants. In this work-in-progress paper, we discuss our aims to apply the technology to the practice of Yoga, in which a core aspect is controlled breathing. We explore the social considerations of deploying this novel technology, and then examine the different possibilities for interaction

"It's not yet a gift": understanding digital gifting

A myriad of digital artifacts are routinely exchanged online. While previous studies suggest that these are sometimes considered to be gifts, CSCW has largely overlooked explicit digital gifting where people deliberately choose to give digital media as gifts. We present an interview study that systematically analyzes the nature of digital gifting in comparison to conventional physical gifting. A five-stage gift exchange model, synthesized from the literature, frames this study. Findings reveal that there are distinctive gaps in people’s engagement with the digital gifting process compared to physical gifting. Participants’ accounts show how digital gifts often involve less labor, are sometimes not perceived as gifts by the recipient and are rarely reflected on and reciprocated. We conclude by drawing out design implications for digital gifting services and rituals

Movement-based co-creation of Adaptive Architecture

Research in Ubiquitous Computing, Human Computer Interaction and Adaptive Architecture combine in the research of movement-based interaction with our environments. Despite movement capture technologies becoming commonplace, the design and the consequences for architecture of such interactions require further research. This paper combines previous research in this space with the development and evaluation of the MOVE research platform that allows the investigation of movement-based interactions in Adaptive Architecture. Using a Kinect motion sensor, MOVE tracks selected body movements of a person and allows the flexible mapping of those movements to the movement of prototype components. In this way, a person inside MOVE can immediately explore the creation of architectural form around them as they are created through the body. A sensitizing study with martial arts practitioners highlighted the potential use of MOVE as a training device, and it provided further insights into the approach and the specific implementation of the prototype. We discuss how the feedback loop between person and environment shapes and limits interaction, and how the selectiveness of this ‘mirror’ becomes useful in practice and training. We draw on previous work to describe movement based, architectural co-creation enabled by MOVE: 1) Designers of movement-based interaction embedded in Adaptive Architecture need to draw on and design around the correspondences between person and environment. 2) Inhabiting the created feedback loops result in an on-going form creation process that is egocentric as well as performative and embodied as well as without contact

From SnappyApp to Screens in the Wild: gamifying an Attention Hyperactivity Deficit Disorder continuous performance test for public engagement and awareness

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental condition that is characterised by three core behaviours: inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity. It is typically thought that around 3-5% of school aged children have ADHD, with lifetime persistence for the majority. A psychometric Continuous Performance Test (CPT) had recently been incorporated into an interactive smartphone application (App), SnappyApp, to allow the measurement of the three ADHD symptom domains. SnappyApp presents a sequence of letters of the alphabet in a pseudo-random manner with responses via the device’s touch screen. Following a pilot test in the general population where the CPT showed sensitivity to ADHD-related symptoms (self-reported impulsive behaviour related to CPT measures), a new project was begun to convert the App into a game Attention Grabber based on the functionality of the test, focussing on the attention and impulsivity domains. The Screens in the Wild (SITW) platform is in the process of being employed for public engagement in awareness about ADHD through interactive technology. SITW has deployed a network of four public touch-screens in urban places. Each of the four nodes has a large (46 inch) display, a camera, a microphone and a speaker. The SnappyApp web-app was translated for presentation on to the SITW platform. The browser-based App was redesigned, with the input of a commercial graphics design company, based on an initial proof-of-concept whereby the original App was reprogrammed to present sequences of graphical objects (fruit) and to introduce further engagement features including animations. A shortened video about Adult ADHD and a brief questionnaire were incorporated to form a stand-alone edutainment package. The earlier design and user testing of SnappyApp is briefly described and details are then provided of the process of gamification to produce Attention Grabber. An evaluation process is described whereby awareness of ADHD and its related symptoms are to be probed. In general, finding out whether and how people engage with interactive screen technology can help in the design of future public engagement and health promotion activities. Ethical considerations are discussed, since public access to this kind of game could potentially raise health anxiety related to self-interpretation of game performance. This risk is balanced with the need to provide health information

Embodied interactions with adaptive architecture

We discuss increasingly behaviour-responsive adaptive architecture from an embodied point of view. Especially useful in this context is an understanding of embodied cognition called ‘the 4E approach,’ which includes embodied, extended, embedded, and enacted perspectives on embodiment. We argue that these four characteristics of cognition both apply to and explain the bodily interactions between inhabitants and their adaptive environments. However, a new class of adaptive environments now expands this notion of embodied interactions by introducing environment-initiated behaviours, in addition to purely responsive behaviours. Thus, we consider how these new environments add the dimension of bodily reciprocity to Adaptive Architecture

Evaluating a public display installation with game and video to raise awareness of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Networked Urban Screens offer new possibilities for public health education and awareness. An information video about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) was combined with a custom browser-based video game and successfully deployed on an existing research platform, Screens in the Wild (SitW). The SitW platform consists of 46-in. touchscreen or interactive displays, a camera, a microphone and a speaker, deployed at four urban locations in England. Details of the platform and software implementation of the multimedia content are presented. The game was based on a psychometric continuous performance test. In the gamified version of the test, players receive a score for correctly selected target stimuli, points being awarded in proportion to reaction time and penalties for missed or incorrect selections. High scores are shared between locations. Questions were embedded to probe self-awareness about ‘attention span’ in relation to playing the game, awareness of ADHD and Adult ADHD and increase in knowledge from the video. Results are presented on the level of public engagement with the game and video, deduced from play statistics, answers to the questions and scores obtained across the screen locations. Awareness of Adult ADHD specifically was similar to ADHD in general and knowledge increased overall for 93 % of video viewers. Furthermore, ratings of knowledge of Adult ADHD correlated positively with ADHD in general and positively with knowledge gain. Average scores varied amongst the sites but there was no significant correlation of question ratings with score. The challenge of interpreting user results from unsupervised platforms is discussed

Proposal of a design pattern for embedding the concept of social forces in human centric simulation models

There exist many papers that explain the social force model and its application for modelling pedestrian dynamics. None of these papers, however, explains how to implement the social force model in order to use it for systems simulation studies. In this paper we propose a design pattern (reusable template) that supports the implementation of the social force model within an artificial lab to run experiments for human centric systems. It allows considering not only people but also static and moveable markups. We demonstrate how to implement the design pattern in two commonly used agent-based modelling packages, Repast Simphony and AnyLogic. For this we use an illustrative example from the Adaptive Architecture domain. Both packages require a slightly different implementation strategy, due to the API constraints they provide. Overall, we found that the design pattern provides very helpful guidance when working on the individual solutions for the different packages