Towards a Taxonomy of Human-Building Interactions
Andrew Pulsipher, Michail N. Giannakos · 2023
Built environments (BE) are increasingly integrating sensing and interactivity capabilities, changing how we co-exist and live. In recent years, HCI, ubiquitous computing, and architecture have contributed to the interdisciplinary field of Human-Building Interaction (HBI). HBI represents the growing complexities of human experience within BE, which includes utilizing sensing capabilities to gracefully support people’s needs. We present an initial taxonomy classifying interactions with HBI devices, the HBI Interactivity Taxonomy, a novel contribution to this field. We employed an integrative research strategy, sampling device descriptions from commercial and academic sources. Taxonomy features were extracted through thematic analysis. The resulting list of characteristics describes how users interact with HBI devices. We offer an initial version of this taxonomy as a tool to facilitate communication and enhance the design and evaluation of future HBI devices in both academia and industry.