A Conceptual Framework for Designing Interactive Human-Centred Building Spaces to Enhance User Experience in Specific-Purpose Buildings
Nazila Roofigari-Esfahan, Elham Morshedzadeh, Poorvesh Dongre
TL;DR
The paper addresses the gap that smart buildings primarily focus on energy efficiency and comfort, limiting bidirectional, context-aware interactions between occupants and buildings. It proposes a holistic HBI framework that fuses HCI and AmI with AI to design intelligent user interfaces (IUIs) and an intelligent data layer for predictive analytics, enabling real-time, multimodal, bidirectional interactions. The approach is demonstrated in a case study of Goodwin Hall at Virginia Tech, using focus groups and semi-structured interviews with students, qualitative coding, and concept mapping to identify occupant-specific needs—chiefly finding study spaces and Indoor Environmental Quality—along with a data-pool concept and AR-enabled interaction strategies. The work offers a practical blueprint for collecting occupant and building data, augmenting building affordances with AR, and applying ubiquitous analytics to tailor learning-support services in academic buildings, with potential implications for energy use, comfort, safety, and overall occupant experience. The findings lay the groundwork for implementing and usability-testing an HBI system in Goodwin Hall to measure impact on learning experiences and occupant well-being.
Abstract
Human/User interaction with buildings are mostly restricted to interacting with building automation systems through user-interfaces that mainly aim to improve energy efficiency of buildings and ensure comfort of occupants. This research builds on the existing theories of Human-Building Interaction (HBI) and proposes a novel conceptual framework for HBI that combines the concepts of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Ambient Intelligence (AmI). The proposed framework aims to study the needs of occupants in specific-purpose buildings, which is currently undermined. Specifically, we explore the application of the proposed HBI framework to improve the learning experience of students in academic buildings. Focus groups and semi-structured interviews were conducted among students who are considered primary occupants of Goodwin Hall, a flagship smart engineering building at Virginia Tech. Qualitative coding and concept mapping were used to analyze the qualitative data and determine the impact of occupant-specific needs on the learning experience of students in academic buildings. The occupant-specific problem that was found to have the highest direct impact on learning experience was finding study space and highest indirect impact was Indoor Environment Quality (IEQ). We discuss new ideas for designing Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), e.g. Augmented Reality (AR), increase the perceivable affordances for building occupants and considering a context-aware ubiquitous analytics-based strategy to provide services that are tailored to address the identified needs.