Introduction to Human-Building Interaction (HBI)

TLDR

Buildings and urban spaces increasingly incorporate AI and new interactivity, raising many research questions about human experiences with built environments, including what environmental attributes HCI researchers should consider, whether architecture and interaction design methods are compatible, how designers can collaborate on architectural projects, and whether architecture can transform HCI theory and practice. This paper introduces Human‑Building Interaction (HBI) as an interdisciplinary field linking HCI with architecture and urban design, aims to examine HCI’s role in shaping built environments, seeks to generate knowledge and guidelines through experimental design, and summarizes the special issue’s contributions to defining HBI’s mission, vision, and scope. The authors frame HBI as an interdisciplinary domain, propose experimental design of novel architecture–digital interaction instances to generate knowledge and guidelines, and summarize the special issue’s manuscripts to outline the field’s development.

Abstract

Buildings and urban spaces increasingly incorporate artificial intelligence and new forms of interactivity, raising a wide span of research questions about the future of human experiences with, and within, built environments. We call this emerging area Human- Building Interaction (HBI) and introduce it as an interdisciplinary domain of research interfacing Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with Architecture and Urban Design. HBI seeks to examine the involvement of HCI in studying and steering the evolution of built environments. Therefore, we needs to ask foundational questions such as: what are the specific attributes of built environments that HCI researchers should take into account when shifting attention and scale from “artefacts” to “environments”? Are architecture and interaction design methods and processes compatible? Concretely, how can a team of interaction designers bring their tools to an architectural project, and collaborate with other stakeholders? Can and will architecture change the theory and practice of HCI? Furthermore, research in HBI should produce knowledge and practical guidelines by experimenting novel design instances that combine architecture and digital interaction. The primary aim of this paper is to specify the mission, vision, and scope of research in Human-Building Interaction. As the introductory paper to the TOCHI special issue, it also provides a summary of published manuscripts and describes their collective contribution to the development of this field.