Metaphor is a design tool that can support designers in forming and exploring new design concepts during the process of designing. In addition to supporting creativity in designing, metaphorical references assist users in perceiving affordances of novel designs. Recent advances in interaction modalities and technologies are leading to a new era in interactive building design. Designing interactive buildings requires the integration of traditional building design and human-computer interaction (HCI) techniques. We developed a metaphorical framework that provides a foundation for reconceptualizing buildings as an interactive experience and supports designers in creative thinking about human-building interaction (HBI). This metaphorical framework can support the metaphorical design process and establish new design spaces for interactive buildings.

To define conceptual spaces for interactive building designs, we categorized three different perspectives of interactive building designs for potential metaphors: user-centered view, building-centered view, and activity centered view. The user-centered view has a focus on how occupants can pro-actively interact with a building design to control their environment or be engaged in information. Most interactive designs involving direct interaction between occupants and buildings belong to this category. The building-centered view has a focus on how a building interacts with the internal or external conditions of the building. Most recent architectural concepts related to adaptive architecture are included in this category, such as kinetic architecture. The activity-centered view has a focus on how a building pro-actively intervenes in occupants’ activities. This is a rare instance in existing interactive building designs since the most existing interactive building designs focus on the user-centered view and building-centered view explained above. We establish the device metaphor for the user-centered view, the robot metaphor for the building-centered view and the friend metaphor for the activity-centered view.

While a metaphorical concept can provide a guiding principle for interactive building designs, analogical reasoning provides a process for transforming the metaphorical concept into a realizable design. We describe two frameworks for analogical reasoning when designing an interactive building: a Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) framework for conceptual framing and a HCI framework for technical framing.

The metaphorical design process starts with the selection of a metaphorical concept, then framing the design concept using the FBS framework iteratively with the HCI framework to synthesize a conceptual design.

We conducted a cognitive study to explore the effect of metaphorical design and different metaphorical prompts on designing interactive buildings. The objective of the study is to compare the effect of a specific metaphorical design prompt with a baseline condition and characterize the effect of the three metaphorical concepts on designing a new concept of interactive building.

To analyze the metaphorical design process, we segmented and coded the transcripts generated from the video stream data based on the metaphorical design process. We segmented and coded the transcripts of each design task session as Concept, HCI, and Other. A concept segment is when the participants discuss a design idea related to function, behavior, and structure. A HCI segment is when the participants discuss HCI techniques. After segmentation, we generated word cloud visualizations to illustrate the quantitative data of word frequency for all words in each segment. We then arranged the visualizations of segments in a time sequence to observe the co-evolution of design concept and HCI.

The metaphorical concepts of device, robot, and friend, increase more conceptual thinking in a design process, encourage designers’ creativity for the conceptualization of new interactive building designs, and is more effective in defining distinct design spaces when designing a new concept of interactive building. Metaphorical design provides the foundation for re-conceptualizing interactive buildings and leads to novel approaches to designing interactive buildings. The identification of the metaphorical concepts along with analogical frameworks opens a new design and research space for interactive building design.