Adaptive Building-Skin Components as Context-Aware Nodes in an Extended Cyber-Physical Network

This paper presents an adaptive building-skin system that attempts to establish the foundations for an intuitive and responsive interface between interior and exterior spaces with respect to environmental, thermal, acoustic, and user-comfort considerations. It does this by enabling each of its components to act as individual, context-aware, sensor-actuator nodes capable of differentiated—yet correlated—actions, reactions, and interactions. The proposal situates the system within an intelligent environment whose ecosystem’s operational scope subsumes yet extends beyond interior environments to include exterior domains via wearable devices. Accordingly, as the sensed data of any device is accessible across all devices in a topology of meshed nodes, the computationally processed behavior of any node is potentially informed by and informing of the status of individual and/or sets of other nodes. In this manner, the building-skin is not construed as a mere envelope, but rather as a system comprised of agents that, in conjunction with all other embedded, ambulant, or wearable agents, actively promote the well-being, comfort, and spatial experience of users.