As a building designer I think it is important for you to ask yourself about how you can make certain functions within the building better — particularly when within a certain room, for instance, where its functions might be highly specialized and complex. As an example, you can think about how a surgeon might work within an operating room, and then ask yourself about what technologies and design methods can help to make that doctor’s surgical procedure better, whether that means making the surgery go faster or reducing redundancy and probability for medical error.
As in the above example, stressful demands are often placed upon the occupants who experience and function productively within your building design. And in such cases, those occupants can really feel how “spatial problems” have greater weight, as their consequences can be negative and have great impact. So how can architecture help? And what does the interactive holograph have to do with all of this?
An article I read recently entitled Amplifying Our Brain Power through Better Interactive Holographics made an interesting point when the author very simply stated that good interface design means placing less of a cognitive load on the end user. Hence, a good design simplifies a complex problem and thereby makes it easier to solve for the occupant. Here is a quote from the article that I think explains this seemingly simple, but very important, concept best:
My former colleague Don Norman at Northwestern University has contributed a great deal to our understanding of this question, in books like The Design of Everyday Things. One of my favorite examples from that book considers two different interfaces to manipulating the position of a car seat. In one interface, on a luxury American car, there is a panel of knobs and buttons almost hidden below the left side of the dashboard. To go from a state of discomfort to a new chair position requires translating your discomfort into a series of knob pulls and twists on a console of many controls with tiny labels below each. In contrast, a German luxury car had a small version of the driver’s chair in the dashboard. To move the back of your chair down, you manipulated the chair in the dashboard accordingly; to move it forward, you would move it in the direction the chair was facing, and so on. One interface placed a large cognitive load on the user to solve the discomfort problem, while the other placed minimal demands.
How to Solve for the Most Demanding of Spaces
Needless to say, a hospital operating room space can be quite complex because of the type of problems solved there. Of course, the operating room in our example from the beginning of this article should inherently be a well thought-out type of design that accounts for the narrative of the surgical process for both the doctor and patient. Not only do a team of medical staff need to operate within a confined space for what can sometimes be a very long time doing highly concentrated and delicate work, but they also need to respond to what can seem to be redundant typical procedures that have the potential for variation.
It is in this variation that I think architectural design and its integrated technologies can help by really boosting the collective power of the medical team by, first and most simply, making complex practices and decisions simpler. This in effect will do two things: (1) medical procedures will be carried out more quickly, and (2) medical procedures will be carried out with greater quality by ensuring less of a chance for error. And should there be an error, a good design of the immediate surrounding environment can “foster and promote” thorough and immediate responses.
Sticking with our operating room example, you might begin to imagine what a technology like an interactive holograph can do within such a complex space. If such a holograph can be experienced by the surgeon to help him or her carry out a specific procedure within the surgery, they might have a guide to keep them focused, and alerted to any current or potential problems that could arise. For instance, a holograph could make a 3-D spatial representation of incoming data about current patient bodily functions and fluctuations while simultaneously making sense of what the medical team is doing (and will need to do), and can compare all of that to previous surgeries of the same type to serve as a benchmark for different steps within that process. This holograph could be visible during the surgery and the medical team could look behind or around the 3D representations being displayed — as might need to be done when operating within the body, which can be difficult to see or visualize, particularly as each patient’s body can be different.
Similarly, adaptive architecture can learn from such examples as the interactive holograph. In fact, the two can work together to really make built space not only more functional, but simpler for the occupant to understand and thereby use. In effect, this will result in an occupant being able to make faster decisions that are usually correct, while also empowering them with time they might need to place their attention where it is most needed.
I think there are lessons to be learned from the interactive holograph — not only from its potential for use to help solve complex problems, but in how interactive architecture can make those complex problems easier for occupants, for that is a way for you to think about designing the most demanding of spaces, by using design to interface between occupant’s thoughts, behaviors and their tools.
Image Credit: © swimparallel | Flickr
