Future of Human-Building Interaction

In 2030, we will have a different interactive experience with our built environments, at home, at work, and even in public urban spaces. This is attributed to advancements in sensing and actuation systems that can integrate into the building infrastructures, in symbiosis with the new environmental concerns that call for new life, work, and mobility styles. This change, whether gradual or sudden, evident or seamless, can have a remarkable impact on our everyday experiences, and thus entails efforts to envision possible scenarios and plan for them. We believe that buildings, as they would embody our digital and physical interactive daily experiences, should be designed and nurtured in a dialogue with their users at the individual as well as social levels. This implies a responsibility of the HCI community to intervene and involve the user in the Human-Building Interaction (HBI) design practice. We propose bringing together expertise from the fields of human-computer interaction, building and urban architecture, and social sciences, and provide them with an occasion for collaboratively creating and sharing "images" of HBI by 2030. The goal is to uncover research opportunities and challenges that will emerge through discussions and multifaceted debates about the topics proposed.