Emotion in Smart Buildings: Can Affective Interaction Shape Smart Agenda in Architecture?

Smart building design has predominantly focused on interactive experiences that enhance human comfort across measurable dimensions, namely thermal, respiratory, visual, and acoustic comfort. In contrast, architectural practices attend to inhabitation as subjective, situated, lived, and socially embedded experiences. This creates a gap between what can be sensed and regulated and the complexity of human experiences in buildings. We argue that an Affective Interaction (AfI) lens offers a way to bridge this gap, and deepen the role of interaction design research in architecture. We illustrate this through two exploratory studies using open-ended, in-situ methods that foreground lived experience and social interpretation. The AfI perspective revealed five Ways in which occupants interpret smart environments — from reading bodily cues and forecasting disruption to making sense of building automation. From these, we distil six Affective Practices and six Interaction Qualities that guide the future of interaction design research in buildings.