Emotion in Smart Buildings: Can Affective Interaction Shape Smart Agenda in Architecture?

Paper Title

Emotion in Smart Buildings: Can Affective Interaction Shape Smart Agenda in Architecture?

Publication Info

• Topic area: Interaction design for smart buildings with a focus on affective experiences.
• Keywords: Smart buildings, human-building interaction, affective interaction, architectural experience, embodied cognition, social context, environmental design, interaction qualities, affective practices, user-centered design.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Current smart building designs prioritize measurable comfort parameters (e.g., temperature, lighting) but overlook the complex, affective, and socially situated dimensions of human experience. Affective computing approaches treat emotions as static and quantifiable, failing to capture the relational and interpretive nature of affect.
• Significance: Bridging this gap is critical for designing smart environments that align with the nuanced ways people inhabit and interpret spaces, fostering richer and more meaningful interactions.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work in human-building interaction (HBI) has expanded beyond comfort to include aesthetics, social engagement, and place-making. However, these approaches often remain reactive and data-driven, neglecting the emergent and interpretive aspects of affective experience. This paper builds on the Affective Interaction (AfI) framework to address these limitations.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The paper introduces an Affective Interaction (AfI) lens to study and design smart buildings, emphasizing lived, relational, and interpretive experiences.
• Novelty:
  1. Identifies five Ways occupants interpret and adapt to smart environments.
  2. Proposes six Affective Practices (AP1–AP6) and corresponding Interaction Qualities (IQ1–IQ6) to guide smart building design.
  3. Develops a methodological framework combining in-situ surveys, building walks, and body mapping to capture affective experiences.
  4. Reframes smart building objectives to prioritize interpretive participation, situated methodologies, and affective fit.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted two exploratory studies in a smart university building:
    1. Study 1: An in-situ survey comparing emotion-framed and comfort-framed prompts to elicit experiential articulations.
    2. Study 2: Building walks with body mapping to trace how occupants interpret and adapt to spaces over time.
  • Thematic analysis identified five experiential themes and informed the development of Affective Practices and Interaction Qualities.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Emotion-framed prompts elicited richer, multidimensional responses (mean categories per response: 1.49 for emotion vs. 1.10 for comfort).
  • Five experiential Ways were identified: interpreting bodily sensations, anticipating disruptions, constructing spatial purpose, making micro-adjustments, and making sense of smartness.
  • Six Affective Practices (e.g., Orient and Appraise, Modulate and (De)Escalate) and six Interaction Qualities (e.g., Somatic Legibility, Smartness Legibility) were proposed to support these practices.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • The AfI lens revealed experiential dimensions (e.g., social context, bodily sensations) that conventional comfort-oriented approaches miss.
  • Highlighted the importance of anticipatory and interpretive behaviors, which are overlooked by reactive, threshold-based systems.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Study 1: 241 survey responses analyzed using inductive coding to identify five categories of experience.
  • Study 2: Building walks with 14 participants (3 group sessions) using thematic analysis to develop experiential themes.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Small sample size and single-site study limit generalizability.
  • Methodology is time-intensive and not scalable.
  • Future work should explore longitudinal studies, hybrid sensing approaches, and operationalize Affective Practices in diverse contexts.

Summary

This paper introduces an Affective Interaction (AfI) lens to address gaps in smart building design by emphasizing lived, relational, and interpretive experiences. Through two exploratory studies, it identifies five Ways occupants engage with smart environments and proposes six Affective Practices and Interaction Qualities to guide design. The findings highlight the importance of anticipatory, embodied, and socially situated interactions, offering a new vocabulary and methodological toolkit for designing affective, user-centered smart environments. Future work should operationalize these concepts in real-world settings to enable meaningful participation and adaptive interactions.