Essay

Introduction

Your building performance can be increased with careful design attention to how it interacts with its occupants. You see, by strategically designing architectural elements to positively influence occupant behavior — you will be creating architecture that helps its occupants to meet their goals. In turn, this increases your building’s value for occupants. In the this video, I will show you how to boost building performance for your occupants, so they’ll not only enjoy the environments that you create, but will also tangibly benefit from them as well.

Transcript

00:01 Maria Lorena Lehman: I’m Maria Lorena Lehman. In this video, I’m going to show you how to increase your building’s performance so that it can better serve its occupants. I’ll show you how to do this by increasing the influence that your building has upon its occupants, to make that influence a positive one, to help them achieve the ultimate goals that they would like to achieve, while experiencing your building.

00:39 MLL: So the question is how do we increase building performance for occupants? So to do that, we have architecture and we have occupants, and the two interrelate and impact one another. You see, oftentimes, architecture is static and occupants have to go to the architecture to obtain their learning. But now as architecture moves from flex design to interactive design to adaptive design, architecture is becoming increasingly able to go to occupants. So this cycle occurs where teaching and learning go back and forth between architecture and occupant. And each can improve because of the other. Now the important thing to notice here is that architecture is gaining in capability as it goes to the occupants.

01:40 MLL: And what does this mean? It means that interaction is becoming ever more potentially possible. Now with interaction, we have just in time design intervention. And what this does is it allows the architecture to intervene at just the right moment to influence occupant behavior and this can happen through the architectural design, through affecting occupant thought, physiology, emotion and even spirituality. And when strategically designed well, the architecture can influence occupant behavior, to help them achieve their end goals. So if you keep this in mind while designing, where your building performance can improve by helping occupants to not only meet their present time needs, but to help them use those needs to accumulate behaviors that lead them towards achieving their goal, building performance will increase dramatically.

02:48 MLL: If you’d like to learn more, I invite you to join my Design Insight Newsletter. And you will also get my book “Bringing Architecture To The Next Level” for free. Discover how you can shift your mindset to reach breakthrough ideas, meet and predict occupant need using sensory design, leverage your design process so you can get more with less, and re-think new technologies to unleash your innovative edge.