Tomorrow's buildings: Smarter by design |
Posted: November 18, 2018 |
The smartest buildings of the future will be those designed with people in mind, according to a new breed of architects trying to put the human at the centre of the process. This can mean design that speaks directly to the function of a building - a hospital designed to help make people better or a school that aims to redefine education. Or it may mean using technology to allow people to get involved in the design process or feedback on how they feel about living or working in a particular building. As part of its Tomorrow's Buildings season, the BBC looks at four ideas that aim to do all of the above. The new era of smart buildings is all about data - but, generally, what is being measured is practical stuff such as temperature, light, the number of people in a building at any given time. But what if you could also measure the feelings of the people inside? Consultant engineers Arup recently experimented with the idea of measuring just that. It installed what it called a "sentiment cocoon" in its offices that sought to capture people's emotions throughout the day. Designed by architect Moritz Behrens and lighting designer Konstantinos Mavromichalis, the 20m (65ft) cocoon structure encouraged workers to record their feelings via dashboards installed around their offices. Individuals swiped their Oyster card (a smartcard used on the London Underground) or any other radio-frequency identification (RFID) card to log in and could choose from three different moods:
Tomorrow's Buildings
Their feelings were digitally projected into a light field created by LEDs running through the spine of the cocoon. It was primarily designed as an art installation but could be developed to measure how people felt about a particular building. In an age when data collection is everywhere, the smartest offices will be the ones that realise measuring people's response to the building is as important as measuring how light and heat perform, says Arup's director of architecture, Nille Juul-Sorensen. "It is not enough to measure the mechanics of the buildings, we also need to collect information about how people react to them," he tells the BBC. "Too often architects hand over the keys to clients and lose track of how people actually feel about the building. "They might, for instance, tell us that the canteen is wonderful but that it is dark and not nice to sit in one particular corner."
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