Despite the increase of users of Mobility Assistive Devices (MobAD), there has been a lack of accessibility in urban environments in many parts of the world. We present a systematic review of how t...

Both breathing and internal self-awareness are an integral part of any yoga practice. We describe and discuss the development of ExoPranayama, an actuated environment that physically manifests users’ breathing in yoga. Through a series of trials with yoga practitioners and expert teachers, we explore its role in the practice of yoga. Our interview results reveal that biofeedback through the environment supported teaching and improved self-awareness, but it impacted group cohesion. Two practical uses of the technology emerged for supporting breath control in yoga: (1) biofeedback can provide new information about users’ current internal states; (2) machine-driven feedback provides users with a future state or goal and leads to improved cohesiveness.

Through sensors carried by people and sensors embedded in the environment, personal data is being processed to try to understand activity patterns and people's internal states in the context of human-building interaction. This data is used to actuate adaptive buildings to make them more comfortable, convenient, and accessible or information rich. In a series of envisioning workshops, we queried the future relationships between people, personal data and the built environment, when there are no technical limits to the availability of personal data to buildings. Our analysis of created designs and user experience fictions allows us to contribute a systematic exposition of the emerging design space for adaptive architecture that draws on personal data. This is being situated within the context of the new European information privacy legislation, the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016. Drawing on the tension space analysis method, we conclude with the illustration of the tensions in the temporal, spatial, and inhabitation-related relationships of personal data and adaptive buildings, re-usable for the navigation of the emerging, complex issues by future designers.

In this paper, we explore the regulatory, technical and interactional implications of Adaptive Architecture (AA) and how it will recalibrate the nature of human-building interaction. We comprehensively unpack the emergence and history of this novel concept, reflecting on the current state of the art and policy foundations supporting it. As AA is underpinned by the Internet of Things (IoT), we consider how regulatory and surveillance issues posed by the IoT are manifesting in the built environment. In our analysis, we utilise a prominent architectural model, Stuart Brand’s Shearing Layers, to understand temporal change and informational flows across different physical layers of a building. We use three AA applications to situate our analysis, namely a smart IoT security camera; an AA research prototype; and an AA commercial deployment. Focusing on emerging information privacy and security regulations, particularly the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016, we examine AA from 5 perspectives: physical & information security risks; challenges of establishing responsibility; enabling occupant rights over flows, collection, use & control of personal data; addressing increased visibility of emotions and bodies; understanding surveillance of everyday routine activities. We conclude with key challenges for AA regulation and the future of human–building interaction.

This paper undertakes an analysis of the “smart school” as a building that both senses and manages bodies through sensory data. The authors argue that smart schools produce a situation of ubiquitous sensation in which learning environments are continuously sensed, regulated, and controlled through complex sensory ecosystems and data infrastructures. This includes the consideration of ethical and political issues associated with the collection of biometric and environmental data in schools and the implications for the design and operation of learning environments which are increasingly regulated through decentralized sensor networks. Working through a relational and adaptive theory of architecture, the authors explore ways of intervening in smart schools through the reconceptualization of sensor technologies as “atmospheric media” that operate within a distributed ecology of sensation that exceeds the limited bandwidth of the human senses. Drawing on recent projects in contemporary art, architecture, and interaction design, the authors discuss specific architectural interventions that foreground the atmospheric qualities and ethical problematics of sensor technologies in school buildings.