Imagine a world where a space reads a person’s cognitive state and adapts in real time to make that environment positively better.
Now, imagine that space is your workplace — an office that intuitively brightens when focus dips, softens its light to ease stress, or subtly shifts its atmosphere to encourage collaboration.
This is the premise of sentient architecture, a relatively new concept that draws upon Human-Building Interaction to create responsive environments that sense and interpret an inhabitant’s mood or behaviour, then adapt to enhance or influence that person’s sense of wellbeing.
An emerging field that highlights the vast potential of artificial intelligence, sentient architecture relies on two sources of data – the Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Self (IoS).
IoT uses smart building sensors to monitor human behaviour in a space and interpret emotions based on facial expressions, tone of voice and gestures, while IoS refers to an individual’s own data cloud, such as fitness trackers and health apps.
What does this mean in terms of lighting?
Understanding the role that lighting design might play in this new paradigm is exciting and thought-provoking in equal measure. Designers can harness AI-generated data to read a person’s emotional state and activity levels, then tailor the lighting around them to boost their mood, enhance comfort levels, or support productivity.
The lighting is actively more responsive because of there is a continual feedback loop between the building and its occupants. Responsive, interactive lighting is nothing new of course as we have been able to creatively control lighting, create atmosphere and affect a person’s mood for a while. But a lighting design system that works as an extension of an AI-driven process feels like a big leap forward.
The potential seems endless, but while sentient architecture and lighting holds great promise.
But should we consider the ethical risk of Sentient Lighting? And do we even need it?
Sentient lighting that interprets emotions based on facial expressions, voice tone and gestures feels borderline invasive. Employees could feel like they are constantly on camera being watched and monitored – not necessarily by a person, but inevitably by ‘something’, so it is important that we consider the wider implications of data privacy. And do we need to pause and consider whether we are using it to foster a genuinely nurturing ecosystem.
Wellbeing is fundamental to the way that we design, but it is not a free pass to do anything. If improving wellbeing leads to increased productivity, then sentient architecture could represent a major advancement, but it should never be the other way around. Improving quality of life and enhancing the human experience should always be our overriding intention.
