Collection 

Human-building interactions

Submission status
Closed
Submission deadline

Advancements in sensing, actuation, and communication are converging to bring about new modes of interaction, experience, and entertainment. This convergence will lead towards different kinds of engagements with the spaces in which we live, work, play, and learn. The built environment is becoming an intelligent partner, taking care of operational and repetitive tasks, understanding, and supporting human activities and needs while freeing people to engage in healthier, more productive, and creative pursuits. Homes, office and industrial buildings, airports, or other infrastructure, as well as the furniture, appliances, and building materials that compose the built environment can engage in and be the subject of human-building interaction in a technology-enabled intelligent partnership.

This collection aims to showcase recent advances in the new but burgeoning field of Human Building Interaction (HBI), a multidisciplinary field that represents the next frontier in convergent research and innovation to enable the dynamic interplay of human and building interactional intelligence. HBI research supports the goal of maximizing human potential while optimizing building performance simultaneously across myriad factors. We will welcome research papers that focus on how humans interact with, perceive, and navigate through built environments, how the built environment can perceive and learn human behaviors and needs and provide solutions to improve quality of life, how reciprocal actions of humans and buildings change and improve building and human behavior, and how these interactions scale from the building scale to the community or city scale and beyond.

Sci-fi three-dimensional space composite image

Editors

Burçin Becerik-Gerber is the Chair and Dean’s Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Southern California. She also serves as the co-director of the Center for Intelligent Environments (CENTIENTS) at USC. Her research focuses on interactions between the built environment and its users, aiming to understand and predict how and why humans interact with their built environment. She uses machine learning and data science to improve design, construction and system intelligence of user-centered built environments. Prof Becerik-Gerber has been an Editorial Board Member for Scientific Reports since 2021.

 

Gale M. Lucas is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. She is an expert in human-computer interaction, affective computing, trust-in-automation, and human-building interaction, studying the interactions between human users and computer technology, such as those between smart buildings and their occupants. Dr Lucas has been an Editorial Board Member for Scientific Reports since 2022.

 

 

 

Hae Young Noh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. Her research focuses on indirect sensing and physics-guided data analytics to enable low-cost non-intrusive monitoring of cyber-physical-human systems. Dr Noh has been an Editorial Board Member for Scientific Reports since 2021.

 

 

 

 

John E. Taylor is the inaugural Frederick Law Olmsted Professor at Georgia Tech, where he currently serves as the Associate Chair for Graduate Programs and Research Innovation in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He directs the Network Dynamics Lab which introduced the concept of smart city digital twins in 2017 with the goal of engineering smarter cities that are simultaneously more sustainable, resilient, livable, and equitable. Prof Taylor has been an Editorial Board Member for Scientific Reports since 2022.