Interactions - November/December 2017

CACM_JOCCH_one-third_page_vertical:Layou

The increasing evidence of the effects
of adaptive environments on their
inhabitants alongside developments
of technology and how we gather
and share data about us now suggest
that HCI thinking is becoming
useful to and perhaps even necessary
for architectural thinking. Thus,
architects need to begin considering
the intended interactions between
inhabitants and digitally augmented
architectural space. They will
need to ask: What meaning can
inhabitants gain from interacting
with adaptive architecture? What
benefits can such interactions have
for them? What contexts and what
spaces would benefit from interactive
architectural elements? Who should
be leading such human-building
interactions (see our work on
reciprocal control)? When do these
interactions occur on an individual
or group level? And how do they
scale to multi-inhabitant scenarios?

of their synchrony motivated practitioners to stay synchronized or try to regain synchrony, making the yoga experience more relational and group focused. Practitioners perceived this emerging quality of the session as very positive.

To explore synchrony further, we built another prototype of adaptive architecture called WABI. It kinetically responds to how its two inhabitants breathe and can do this for each inhabitant independently.

These are only a few questions that point toward an exciting future of our interactions with adaptive architecture.

Endnotes

1. Wiberg, M. Interaction design meets architectural thinking. Interactions

WABI can process data from both inhabitants to create different interaction modes and data mappings:

22, 2 (2015), 60–63; http://doi. org/10.1145/2732936

2. Jelić, A., Tieri, G., De Matteis, F., Babiloni, F., and Vecchiato, G. The enactive approach to architectural experience:

ACM
Journal on
Computing and
Cultural
Heritage

• Inhabitants can be surrounded by their own data—a one-to-one mapping of their data to their immediate surroundings.

A neurophysiological perspective on embodiment, motivation, and affordances. Frontiers in Psychology 7, 608 (2016), 658–20; http://doi.org/10.3389/ fpsyg.2016.00481

• Their data can be aggregated— WABI’s response to the average of inhabitant data is equal for both inhabitants.

• The data can be crisscrossed— inhabitant A is surrounded by the data/behavior of inhabitant B and vice versa.

3. I mean haptic here in the sense of actively exploring an object (or environment) by moving one’s body. Or, as Gibson (1966) put it, haptic perception is “the sensibility of the individual to the world adjacent to his body by use of his body.” Hence, this includes proprioception/ kinaesthesia, the sense of our own body in relation to its environment.

An initial exploratory study of WABI (currently in preparation for publication) indicates that crisscrossing data seems to facilitate synchrony between inhabitants more than other interaction modes.

4. De Jaegher, H. and Di Paolo, E. Participatory sense-making. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6, 4 (2007), 485–507; http://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9076-9

5. Schnadelbach, H. Adaptive architecture. Interactions 23, 2 (2016), 62–65; http:// doi.org/10.1145/2875452.

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AN (EN)ACTION PLAN

6. Fuchs, T. The Phenomenology of Affectivity. OUP Oxford, 2013.

7. Jäger, N., Schnädelbach, H., Hale, J., Kirk, D., and Glover, K. Reciprocal control in adaptive environments. Interacting with Computers 29, 4 (Jul. 2017), 512–529; http://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iw w037

8. Moran, S., Jäger, N., Schnädelbach,

JOCCH publishes papers of significant and lasting value in all areas relating to the use of ICT in support of Cultural Heritage, seeking to combine the best of computing science with real attention to any aspect of the cultural heritage sector.

H., and Glover, K. ExoPranayama: A biofeedback-driven actuated environment for supporting yoga breathing practices. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing

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20, 2 (Apr. 2016), 261–275; http://doi. org/10.1007/s00779-016-0910-3

At the time of this writing, Nils Jäger was a research fellow in the Mixed Reality Laboratory, University of Nottingham, U.K. He is now a lecturer in digital architecture at the School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering, Loughborough University, U.K. A trained architect, he investigates the bodily relationship between inhabitants and (adaptive) architecture.