Re-Imagining Mediated Human Building Interaction and Sensory Environments: Volume II

About this Research Topic

Background

We are entering an era of machine intelligence. This will potentially transform every aspect of our lives and hold the potential making buildings more adaptive to human needs. At the same time, as buildings potentially gain autonomous capabilities, Human Building Interaction HBI will likely involve greater automation and real-time dynamic interactions, transforming the relationship between humans, non-human agents, and buildings. This raises important questions about the evolving relationship between humans, non-human agents, and the new environments they inhabit, offering new challenges and opportunities across aspects of interactional, spatial, technological, cognitive, social, and environmental dimensions (Fatah et al, 2025).

This Research Topic aims to extend our understanding of key factors identified in Volume One, including the impact on human physiological and emotional responses, the need to consider embodiment as a lived human experience, and the importance of incorporating real-world conditions in HBI research. We envision that the new phase will require a deeper understanding of how to curate and support collaboration between agents, both human and non-human. We are interested in understanding the interface between the building envelope and the sensory experience through the body using vision, sound, smell, touch, and proprioception. Here, the notion of affective curatorship (Varutti, 2023) may provide a valuable framework for re-imagining the new lived human experience.

This collection invites novel explorations in related theories, methodologies, applications, and interpretations from academia (architecture, HCI, neuroscience, cognitive science, etc.), media art, and practitioners. We seek to assemble leading research and address the development of design principles for the creation of such systems that are theoretically well-founded and empirically tested. The intention is to consolidate research in these domains and to provide new directions to further understand this shift from the scale of the body to the scale of the building that are bound to the contexts we inhabit.

This Research Topic aims to publish high-quality, peer-reviewed papers on research grounded in any aspect of human-building interaction. The following are examples but submissions need not be limited to these:

- Design principles for the development of integrated sensory experiences.

- Technological advances in sensory artificial systems (such as, but not limited to, artificial lighting, sound, smell, haptics...) that support human-building interactions, situated physically or remotely; extended and hybrid, whether through visual, auditory, tactile, or olfactory mechanisms.

- Advances in understanding the built environment as an integral system encompassing spatial, physical, digital, sensorial, and social forms of interactions, through both situated and telepresence across space and time.

- Implications of approaching the design of network and sensory systems as an integral part of the design of the built environment.

- Bridging methodological gaps that stem from the shift of focus and scale within the realm of the built environment.

- Applications in various fields such as health care, museums, education, office, home, and retail environments.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Registered Report
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Human-Building Interaction, Multi-Sensory Environments, Spatial Experience, Mediated Sensory Systems, Immersion and Presence

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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