Learning from architecture

Tilo Krueger
Sep 5, 2018 · 2 min read

In this week’s reading we went outside of our own discipline and looked at architecture and how it relates to interaction design.

In How Buildings Learn, Steward Brand describes how a building is made up of six distinct layers. What fascinated me about this idea is that each outer layer influences the layer below or within it. He states that the location and site of the building determines its basic structure, which then determines its skin or outer appearance, which determines its services like plumbing and wiring, which then determine the floor plan, which then determines where furniture goes and ultimately determines how humans behave towards the building. This concept of layering can be directly related to interaction design.

Similar to a building, a designed experience can also be described using layers. There is a layer defining the location of an interaction, its medium like a screen or a physical product, the delivery like a graphical user interface or a voice based interface, the flow or how one moves through it and down to buttons or commands. All of these layers are ultimately determined by the layer above it.

Interaction design and architecture also relate in terms of navigation. One could argue that a floor plan directly determines how a person might move throughout a building. How do they enter? Through a door on the side of the building or a grand entranceway? How many doors do the rooms have and how large are they? Are they connected with hallways, stairs, elevators, ladders or not connected at all? The relationships between these elements play an important role when planning the building. Interaction designers have a different toolkit at their disposal but are also ultimately concerned with the same things architects are: how might humans interact with what they have created? Human decision making and individual actions however cannot always be anticipated neither by architects nor interaction designers. This is how people get stuck in complex structures, both in terms of architecture like getting lost in a basement or in terms of interaction design like giving up on a confusing remote control.

Architects have a fundamental influence on how humans interact with one another in space. A communal kitchen at the center of an office space might lead to coworkers actively engaging with each other throughout the work day while cleanly separated office spaces like cubicles might have the exact opposite effect, namely suppressing human interaction. The same goes for interaction designers. Enabling foreigners to converse in each others languages using virtual translators might lead to unexpected human bonding while an immersive virtual reality experience might isolate the single user from their physical world completely.

Written by

Interaction Designer @ IDEO // www.tilokrueger.com

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