Project receives top award in international architecture competition
“Wisteria: Architecture as an Embodiment of Human Emotion,” an emotive intelligent responsive project led by School of Design + Construction professor Mona Ghandi, has received the popular choice award in the Architizer A+Awards for the Architecture + New Technology category.
The international competition celebrates the best new buildings and spaces in architecture with thousands of projects from more than 100 countries submitted for consideration.
Wisteria is an adaptive installation that performs real-time responses to people’s emotions, based on biological and neurological data.
“We integrated artificial intelligence (AI), wearable technology, sensory environments, and adaptive architecture to create an emotional bond between a space and its occupants and encourage affective emotional interactions between the two,” said Ghandi.
The project allows visitors to change the color and form of the installation using their brain and emotions.
“Using affective computing or ‘Emotion AI,’ this project created a cyber-physical space that blurs the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres,” she said. “This project is the extension of its visitors’ mind and body.”
With WSU since 2016, Ghandi’s research focuses on intelligent architecture, examining the role of AI, machine learning, robotics, and adaptive architecture in improving well-being in buildings. Her research aims to create cyber-physical adaptive spaces that can respond to the user’s physiological and psychological needs based on biological and neurological data in real-time. Her focus is on smart systems that create adaptive and user-oriented spaces using affective computing. Through artificial intelligence, she seeks to create spaces that can learn from the user’s behavioral patterns in real-time, enhance environmental quality, reduce user’s anxiety and depression, and promote more flexible, human-centered designs.
Ghandi has applied this approach in correlation with biofeedback data, aspiring to make buildings more attuned to the psychology of their occupants.
