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The design of a workplace can have a profound impact on the effectiveness of the workforce utilizing the space. When considering dynamic social activities in the flow of work, the constraints of the static elements of the interior reveals the adaptive behaviour of the occupants in trying to accommodate these constraints while performing their daily tasks. To better understand how workplace design shapes social interactions, we ran an empirical study in an office context over a two week period. We collected video from 24 cameras in a dozen space configurations totaling 1,920 hours of recorded activities. We utilized computer vision techniques, to produce skeletonized representations of the occupants, to assist in the annotation and data analysis process. We present our findings of socio-spatial formation patterns and the effects of furniture and interior elements on the observed behaviour of collaborators for both computer-supported work and for unmediated social interaction. Combining the observations with an interview of the occupants' reflections, we discuss dynamics of socio-spatial formations and how this knowledge can support social interactions in the domain of space design systems and interactive interiors.

A well-designed workplace has a direct and significant impact on our work experiences and productivity. In this paper, we investigate how office interior layouts influence the way we socially experience office buildings. We extend the previous work that examined static social formations of office workers by looking at their dynamic movements during informal desk visiting interactions. With a month of video data collected in the office, we implemented a vision-based analysis system that enables us to examine how people occupy space in social contexts in relation to desk configurations. The results showed that both social territoriality and approach path highlight social comfort in human-building interactions, which are different from efficiency or path optimization. From these findings, we propose the concepts of socio-spatial comfort: social buffers, privacy buffers, and varying proxemics to inform a user-centered way of designing human building interactions and architecture.

Energy consumption in buildings contributes to 41% of global carbon dioxide emissions through electricity and heat production, making the design of mechanical systems in buildings of paramount importance. Industry practice for design of mechanical systems is currently limited in the conceptual design phase, often leading to sub-optimal designs. By using Generative Design (GD), many design options can be created, optimized and evaluated, based on system energy consumption and life-cycle cost (LCC). By combining GD for Architecture with GD for HVAC, two areas of building design can be analyzed and optimized simultaneously, resulting in novel designs with improved energy performance. This paper presents GD for HVAC, a Matlab script developed to create improved zone level mechanical systems for improved energy efficiency. Through experiments, GD methodologies are explored and their applicability and effect on building HVAC design is evaluated.

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