Sentient Matter: Towards Affective Human-Architecture Interaction

Interactive architecture;Kinect;Emotive architecture;Laban Movement Analysis;Architecture

Yiming, Wang

University of Waterloo

关键词: Interactive architecture;    Kinect;    Emotive architecture;    Laban Movement Analysis;    Architecture;   

Others  :  https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/10012/9763/7/Wang_Yiming.pdf

瑞士|英语

来源: UWSPACE Waterloo Institutional Repository

【 摘 要 】

Interactive design has been embedded into every aspect of our lives.Ranging from handy devices to architecturally scaled environments,these designs have not only shifted the way we facilitate interaction withother people, but they also actively reconfigure themselves in responseto human stimuli. Following in the wake of interactive experimentation,sentient matter, the idea that matter embodies the capacity to perceiveand respond to stimuli, attempts to engage in a challenging arena that fewarchitects and architectural researchers have ventured into. In particular,the creation and simulation of emotive types of interaction between thearchitectural environment and its inhabitants.This ambition is made possible by the collaboration of multipledisciplines. Cybernetics, specifically the legacy of Pask’s conversationtheory, inspires this thesis with the question of why emotion is needed infacilitating human–architecture communication; why emotion appraisaltheory (P. Desmet) within psychology supports the feasibility of anarchitectural environment to elicit emotional changes on its participant aswell as the possibility of generating a next-step response by having theparticipant’s emotive behaviors observed; and why movement notationsystems, especially Laban Movement Analysis (a movement ratingscale system), helps us to understand how emotions can be identifiedby motion elements that signify emotive behavior. Through the processof decomposing movement into several qualitative and quantitativefactors such as velocity, openness, and smoothness, emotions embodiedin motion can be detected and even manipulated by altering thosemovement factors. Moreover, with the employment of a Kinect sensor,live performance can be analyzed in real time.Based on the above research and inspired by the Kinetic sculpturesof Margolin, the final product of this thesis is the development of aprototype that translates human movements that are expressive ofemotion into continuous surface transformations, thus making evidenthow such emotive states might be transcoded into an architectural form.In this process, four typical emotive architectural expressions—joy,anger, excited, and sadness—are researched. This thesis also documentsthree virtual scenarios in order to examine the effect of this interactivesystem. Different contexts, kinetic types, and behavioral strategies arepresented so that we may explore their potential applications.Sentient matter outlines a framework of syntheses, which is built uponthe convergence of embedded computation (intelligence) and physicalcounterpart (kinetics). In the entire process, it considers people’sparticipation as materials that fuel the generation of legible emotionalbehaviors within an architectural environment. Consequently, thereis potential for an architectural learning capacity coupled with anevolving data library of human behavioral knowledge. This opens doorsfor futuristic designs where the paradigm shifts from ;;What is thatbuilding?” to ;;What is that building doing?”