Interaction design meets architectural thinking

Architectural Design, 2005

The onset of digital technologies is often cited as the determining force behind the recent paradigm shift in architecture. Here, Antonino Saggio makes the case for interactivity. He argues that it is interactivity rather than hardware or software that has been the essential catalyst, providing the fundamental precepts underlying contemporary communications and bringing with it a new configuring of relationships in which the subject takes centre stage and shifts the object to the periphery. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Digital Creativity, 2004

Space becomes place through a rich interplay of actors, actions and associations, and techniques drawn from performance, gaming and architecture are well adapted to helping us understand and design for complex environments. Our experience working with masters-level interaction design students in the ATELIER project has demonstrated that these 'cross dressing' techniques can create a climate of awareness in which inspirational learning and innovative design can occur.

Proceedings of the International Conference on GSM4Q: Game Set and Match IV 2019 Qatar connecting people spaces machines, 2019

With rapid advance of new technologies and mediated built space has shifted from a static context of functions serving users to a new participant of social relationships. Interactive abilities and computational power allow built space to become smart, dynamic, and interactive, gaining agency, able to receive information and think, perceive and learn, respond and change behavior in real time. This paper considers architectural components and users as participants of a social network and investigates their agency within this network, modes of interaction and how the components of this system influence each other. Perception of space within or outside of the building body has become a derivative of interaction between the space and the users, and therefore subject to design and programming by architects. The principal goal of this paper is to investigate the new definition of social role of interactive architecture and explain how it communicates with users, investigate the new propert...

IASDR2013 Proceedings

Through the course Dense Spaces 2012—i.e. designing small, intelligent spaces such as elevators—carried out together with a group of architecture students at Umeå School of Architecture, Umeå University, Sweden, we report on, exemplify, and discuss how architectural theories, skills, and attitudes can come to complement and provide new food for thought for other design fields, including interaction design. We present the course, discuss some resulting spaces, and reflect on feedback from the participants. Then, we discuss some outcomes of the course that have broader implications. Unlike a more traditional technology-centered perspective, an architectural approach seems more prone to focus on designing what we term dynamic absence, i.e. design also concerned with what is not there. In a similar vein, an architectural approach also seems to address complexity by not fragmenting design challenges into smaller problems. The more holistic architectural attitude provides the opportunity to treat technology as a design material, along with the other architectural design materials the design situation offers, including structures, light, space, and absence. In this way, the architectural approach seems to shift the attention away from the design of representations and metaphors to instead focus on designing meaningful engagements in these spaces.

Interactive architecture is a fairly recent phenomenon enabled through new materials and technologies. Through experimentation architects are coping with questions of changeability, adaptability, and interaction. However, there are no comprehensive design methods to support this type of architecture. In this paper we aim to bring together methods that can support the design of interactive architecture. The methods are ordered in a methodological framework that provides an overview of possible approaches.

Buildings, 2019

In this position paper, we present the results of an ongoing theoretical investigation into the phenomenon of interactive architecture. Interaction in architecture deals with the meaningful exchange of information and physical acts between building and person. This goes beyond responsive systems like automated doors, shading systems, and so on. Most examples of interactive architecture are technological explorations that probe possibilities and the potential for interaction. In this paper we claim that this is not enough. The notion of interactive architecture is explored through social aspects, user experience, situatedness, and agent-based theory. From this we argue that interactive buildings need comprehensive and consistent styles of interaction rather than a series of isolated and unrelated interaction events. Different people in various contexts require different sets of behavior from an interactive building. These sets are conceptualized as interaction narratives, following the work of Maria Lehman. We argue that such narratives can provide a better fit of the interactive building with the user, and lead to a more profound understanding of such systems.

Interaction design in the built environment: Designing for the ‘Universal User’

Proceedings of the extended abstracts of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI EA '14, 2014

For many in the field of HCI, location and space are synonymous; yet, as we move from the mobile era to the ubiquitous era, computing becomes entangled with notions of space. This workshop critically examines the role of space in human-computer interfaces. The objective is to bring together diverse perspectives of space, drawing from architecture, philosophy, art, geography, design, dance, spatial-cognition, mathematics, computing, and still other domains, towards foregrounding space in theoretical discussions and explorations within the CHI community. Expected outcomes are the reporting of fresh insights into the impact and role of space in the interaction process.

ABSTRACT In this paper we introduce two approaches to interaction with technical systems and draw parallels between them and dominate approaches to design within the HCI community. Each of these approaches includes a particular perspective on how to frame both the design problem and its evaluation. We argue that the core problem to experience design's acceptance, as a discipline, is not refining the theories and methods of experience design itself.

2010

The paper follows the development of digital tools for architects and briefly discusses their utility within education and practice. The move from static CAD tools to time based media followed by programmatic processes and virtual environment design is addressing the evolution of the profession and to an extent reflects practitioners’ needs. The paper focuses on the notion of interactivity and how it is been addressed in various fields. Borrowing from computer science and game design the author presents a course dealing with designing interactivity, responsiveness and users feeding their input back in the design. The aim of the paper is to analyse and support a new set of tools in architectural curricula that will implement interactivity and integrate it into spatial design leading to a holistic approach promoting intelligence, hybridity and responsiveness of the built environment. Following, the elaboration of the rationale, a brief discussion on tools and project directions is car...