Building the Programmable Environment: Co-Design and Physical/Digital Space Making

While not often obvious in its physical manifestations, technology shapes the way we inhabit our everyday spaces, where we live, work, learn, heal, and interact with each other. Our exploration of this medium as intrinsic to the very make up of furniture, walls, ceilings, and the building systems structuring our environments has revealed vast implications for how we design for future habitats. Today, the speed of adoption of technology is far greater than what our current buildings or environments can absorb.

But what if our physical buildings could dynamically evolve after construction ends? What if information became a design material? What if our work environments could transform to increase our productivity, and do so while reducing the environmental impact of change?

The design and production of physical/digital spaces is at the heart of what we call the Programmable Environment, an initiative driving research and innovation at Herman Miller. Instead of environments complete and fixed in time, subject to renovation or demolition when their purpose is no longer relevant, the result is a spatial system designed to evolve over time, in interaction with the users who inhabit it.

Magnolfi’s talk will describe the principles of design of the Programmable Environment, tropes guiding the exploration for the integration of physical computing in their vision of future environments. In the presentation, she will describe their first innovation that introduces programmability into building infrastructure systems. She will further introduce the initial findings on the implications of programmability at the scale of the environment, sharing the study of the interaction of things in the environment which, in traditional practices, are not connected—new archetypes of physical/digital place making, using lighting and textile technology as a way to define adaptive space, activating ceiling elements to create temporary dedicated use spaces, the design of integrated utility delivery systems to increase user control, or finding ways to integrate use data into renovation projects. Fundamental to the work is the role of the user, which they elevate to the level of co-designer, an active participant in the evolution of programmable spaces that adapt to support their activities.