Sensory Buildings
BREO Part 3 — Giving Buildings a Voice (and a Face and a Nose)
Paul leads the user experience design team in the Los Angeles office of @ArupAmerica. This is the third part in a series on making buildings smarter by engaging occupants to reduce building consumption
In Part 1 and 2 of this series we made a case for creating buildings that can “communicate” their natural resource usage those of us working within them. In doing so, we can learn to sense when our buildings are consuming beyond our human needs[i]. Once we sense and understand, we can respond and make corrections.
Here, Part 3 explores the sensory interface tools that designers can leverage to create more communicative buildings.
Sensing Data
The natural world communicates information in numerous ways. The sun’s movement tells the time and plants reveal their health and the condition of the soil. If we didn’t have calendars, the moon, the feel of the air, and the honking of geese overhead could help us identify the the season. When there is a nearby fire, we can sense it with our noses before we see (or feel) anything. We have all learned at some level to “read” and understand all of these sensory “data”. This is the way our world around us communicates. We now have the data, the technical ability, and the understanding of the human senses to make buildings that can communicate in similar ways; through image, sound, touch and smell. Buildings can have qualitative, sensory indicators to tell us how much of the planet’s resources we’re consuming so that we might relate and respond.
Buildings should not be limited to communicating only through numbers and charts. Their data should be ambient and, as a result, intuitive. If we want to understand what is going on in a building, the most effective tools are visualization and auralization. In addition, in BREO systems, it may be useful to broaden our sensory, data-driven palate to technologies that provide smells and tactile experiences. Ambientization is the term we created to describe using data in new ways to create multi-modal sensory experiences.
There are many ways that the electricity consumption or water usage in a building can be expressed through ambientization. These include, but are not limited to dynamic lighting, soundscapes, temperature or scents. One important consideration when choosing the appropriate sensory tool for making data more ambient is that each representation, or expression, must be able to indicate a positive state, a neutral state or a negative state based on resource benchmarking. Simply, when a building is below its maximum usage level (based on real-time trending) , generally, the sensory experience will offer positive reinforcement and vice versa.
What does it mean to have an ambient sensory technology system that reflects the environment in which we live and work? Can a building that converts data into sound and light communicate and have a dialog with its inhabitants? Can people sense what is happening within a building’s infrastructure the way we feel elevated outdoor temperatures driven by the excess of CO2 in our atmosphere? Building a dynamic ambient environment driven by building data may be the best way to improve building performance while, at the same time, creating an understanding for when our built environment is damaging our natural environment.
In their book Sensory Design Malnar and Vodvarka [ii] describe how we interact with our surroundings when they state
Phenomenal reality is … the result of sensori-emotional experience, suggesting an ongoing dialog between human beings and the entities that surround us.
We may conventionally think of “entities” around us as trees and animals, but our more common entities are walls, ceilings, lights, etc. Using dynamic sensory design we can build an environment that is truly capable of having a type of “dialog”. Digital technology offers a wide variety of options for designing the sensory layers of our buildings through video displays, lighting, cameras, loudspeakers, microphones, scent machines, etc. Designers should be careful not be be biased in favor of visual tools only but to also consider the full range of sensory technologies that can broaden the “vocabulary” used to express multiple data types.
Human perception has been refined since our grammar school days of learning about the “five senses”. Cognitive scientists have developed more ways to categorize the ways humans sense the world. Malnar and Vodvarka offer these five categories: visual, sound, odor, haptic and orientation (proprioceptive). A physical environment typically includes some level of all these sensory elements. The good designer will consider all of our senses and will intentionally use sensory elements to support the story that is being told. The tools for sensory design can range from traditional materials to new generative and interactive technologies. Here we’re focused on technological systems and how they might be used to create a sort of sensory communications system between buildings and occupants. It may be useful to map sensory technologies based on human senses (Figure 1) as a starting place for designing expressive and communicative buildings.
Anthropomorphic Buildings
When we refer to the idea of buildings “expressing” or “communicating”, it may seem that we are anthropomorphizing buildings, attributing human characteristic to them. This is a reasonable, and maybe useful way to think about how the buildings can interact with people. We have been attributing human characteristics to non-humans for millennia, e.g., personifying the sun as a god. One problem with this way of thinking is that it is a form of human-centricity, which is ultimately responsible for our planet’s degradation. Because we have believed our species to be more important than the rest of the planet’s animals, plants and materials, we feel that these “lesser” elements are at our service: there for the taking. Human-centricity has resulted in our separation from the rest of the world — and our buildings mirror this — keeping us warm, electrified and well hydrated without any appreciation or knowledge about what empowers these systems or what impact they are having on the world.
Indigenous cultures often have a different way of thinking about the world that re-integrates humans back into “nature”. We use quotations there because humans are not outside of nature. Words like nature (as opposed to “human”) make is seem as though there is a “us” and an “it”. Jane Bennett in her book Vibrant Matter [iii] makes a case for a philosophy of integrated thinking:
Humanity and nonhumanity have always performed in an intricate dance with each other. There was never a time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity; today this mingling has become harder to ignore.
She goes on in another section of the book:
Does life only make sense as one side of the life-matter binary, or is there such a thing as a mineral or metallic life, or a life of the it in “it rains”? I think that there is, and that there are good ecological and biotechnological reasons for us to get better acquainted with it.
Instead of giving human traits to a building, it may be more useful to consider buildings and materials that they are made from as a continuum of elements in the world. The so-called “inorganic” world affects us much more than we realize. It is time to have a closer relationship with our buildings by dialoging with them.
Buildings that make us smarter
“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,” -Sir Winston Churchill
Buildings shape us and our thoughts in so many ways. The spaces we build and the technology that we install augment how we think and interact with each other. We can consider the environments in which we exist, including buildings, furniture, mobile devices, even eyeglasses, as extensions of our cognitive abilities. The desk and pencil allow us to draw and process our ideas. The windows allow us to gaze at the horizon and which helps us to be more creative. Electronic lighting extends the amount of time we can read to develop our ways of thinking. One might go as far as to consider buildings as a type of prosthetics[iv] that extend our physical and mental capabilities. In the paper Distributed Cognition, Ed Hutchins says [v],
“Humans create their cognitive powers by creating the environments in which they execute those powers”.
This is what BREO is designed to do — increase our power to do something about the environment where we currently do not have the power or agency today (which will be covered more in Part 4). By creating systems that enable buildings to reveal the efforts and resources expended to support us and our work, we also create an opportunity for us to respond and connect with our environments. These systems can enable conversations between buildings and people — and a conversations often lead to new ideas.
Building Communications
The idea of using sensory tools for building communication is not a new idea. Several precedents for buildings communications with human occupants have existed for decades:
Fire alarms: These systems use building sensors to check the air for smoke and heat. One could relate this to the human senses of smell and touch. When this system senses something indicative of fire — it activates sound (i.e., yells at us) and light alarms for occupants so that they can act appropriately and exit the building. This common system is the most akin to the type of expressive system that we are discussing here.
HVAC and Lighting systems: The ambient temperature of an office is “felt” by a building’s thermostats leveraging a haptic dialog. Occupants desire a certain temperature and the system responds to meet their targets. This is a dialog where a building takes “direction” from occupants and responds in-kind. Lighting systems are similar.
Unfortunately, in offices temperature and lighting are often regulated by building engineers. Some advanced comfort control systems (e.g., the ComfyApp) can give occupants more agency to set temperatures (at least average temperatures) and potentially set them for saving energy when needed.
Power outages: Power events communicate that there has either been an in-building system fault or broader electrical grid event. This event is experienced by occupants with mostly visual clues via lighting or computer displays going dark — a simple, but clear form of communication.
Water leaks and infestations: These events can communicate to occupants through the sound, odor, tactile and visual senses, as you can imagine.
These are examples of multi-sensory events (more of which are shown in Figure 2) that, in many cases, signify a building in some type of short-term distress. These building “ailments” are generally important to occupants, indicating the state of potential or actual danger or deterioration. But there are few, if any, systems that tell occupants when the building is doing something — good or bad — for the current and future state of the environment (Figure 3). These urgent issues must be addressed in every conceivable way. This is where more expressive buildings can help.
Imagine
- A dynamic decorative light feature throughout an office that creates a continuous ambient environment indicating when occupants are being supplied either renewable power sources or fossil fuel from the grid.
- A building that expresses our water usage through subtle soundscapes that have a gentle river sound when water is below benchmark use, but become harsh when too much water is being used.
- A subtle change in the smell of the air when it has become unhealthy to breathe (similar to the scent that is added to odorless natural gas for detection).
- An ambient temperature that reflects outdoor temperatures (scaled for some comfort) so that inside we have a sense of the climate changing.
These types of building expressions can be created simply by linking existing building data with sensory technologies. Once built, they may provide an almost intuitive sense of our “artificial” environments that is not unlike knowing that there is a drought by observing the riverbank as indigenous cultures have done for thousands of years. This type of sensory environment will connect us, not only with our buildings but also to the outside world. Buildings can tell us when they are harming the environment or when they are being good global “citizens”. And since humans are benefiting from the building’s resources, we can and should respond to make corrections to bring our buildings back into the reasonable and necessary limits.
The Role of the Artist in BREO systems
Artists are the world’s experts at sensory experiences and art is an essential part of creating a beautiful, qualitative sensory data environment. A range of artist may be involved in a BREO system; from sound and visual artists to scent designers. Artists that create abstract visual work or music have spent their lives understanding how qualitative sensory expressions can be effective. They create work that communicates emotions and tell stories without necessarily using words or recognizable figures[vi]. Landscape architects may also be an excellent design resource in this creative process since they are skilled at thinking about dynamic, expressive systems[vii]. In this project, if we want to create a more intuitive way of expressing building sustainability, it will be essential that we leverage the expertise of talented artists and their heightened sensory communication skills.
In the next part of this series, we will explore what is needed to enable occupants to respond to these ambient data in order to adjust and improve building performance.
[i] Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Welcome to Your World: How the built environment shapes our lives
[ii] Malnar and Vodvarka, Sensory Design
[iii] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things
[iv]Mark Wigley, Prosthetic Theory: The Disciplining of Architecture
[v] Ed Hutchins, Distributed Cognition
[vi] Conversations with artist Carole Kim and architect Ashley Hastings
[vii] Conversation with Kush Parekh and Dawn Dyer from Studio MLA
