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CHI '26 · Honorable mention · full-paper review · confidence medium-high

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

Shruti Rao , Judith Good , Hamed Alavi

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This is a thoughtful, concept-forward CHI paper that makes a credible case for moving smart buildings beyond threshold-based comfort models. Its main value is not technical automation but a well-motivated AfI framing and a set of reusable interpretive constructs grounded in exploratory in-situ work.

Axes Lens

Rare contribution shape, typical evidence profile. The point here is not a score. It is to show what kind of claim the paper makes, and whether the evidence pattern is unusual or baseline in this 268 -review set.

Review Summary

This paper’s strongest contribution is conceptual rather than infrastructural: it reframes smart buildings through an Affective Interaction lens and uses two exploratory studies to surface how occupants interpret and adapt to environments in embodied, anticipatory, and socially situated ways. That is a real departure from the dominant comfort-and-threshold paradigm in smart-building research, because the paper argues that people often act before systems detect anything measurable. The novelty lies in the synthesis: five Ways, six Affective Practices, and six Interaction Qualities are presented as design-relevant constructs that can help interaction designers and architects think beyond reactive sensing. The evidence base is credible for that purpose, but it is still bounded. The studies are exploratory, qualitative, and conducted in a single public educational smart building, so the paper supports concept generation and field argument more than broad empirical generalization. The authors are also appropriately explicit about limits: scalability is constrained, building walks require time and trust, and the work prioritizes subjective meaning-making over long-term sensing. As a CHI contribution, this reads as a strong honorable-mention style paper because it offers a useful vocabulary and a persuasive bridge between architecture and interaction design, while remaining careful about what the data can and cannot justify.

What Changed

Canon before

Prior smart-building work is framed around measurable comfort thresholds and reactive sensing; architectural discourse emphasizes lived, situated inhabitation. The paper positions AfI as a bridge between these traditions.

Departure from common sense

The paper argues that smart buildings should not wait for threshold breaches to act: occupants already adjust early and subtly using bodily cues and anticipatory sense-making that reactive systems miss. That is a meaningful departure from the common event-driven comfort model in building automation.

Actual novelty

The paper’s novelty is a conceptual reframing: it applies an Affective Interaction lens to smart buildings and derives new constructs—five Ways, six Affective Practices, and six Interaction Qualities—from exploratory in-situ studies. The contribution is primarily a framework/synthesis rather than a new system.

Evidence

Evidence supports a qualitative, exploratory contribution grounded in two in-situ studies in one smart university building. The paper reports that participants interpret environments through embodied and anticipatory cues, and that these observations are synthesized into Ways, Affective Practices, and Interaction Qualities. The scope is concept-building rather than broad empirical validation.

Limits

Method limits

The methodology is exploratory and open-ended, which is appropriate for generating concepts but not for establishing causal or generalizable effects. The paper itself notes scalability limits and that building walks require time and trust.

Deployment limits

Findings are tied to a single public educational smart building and may not transfer to privately owned residential spaces. The approach also prioritizes subjective meaning-making over long-term sensing, limiting deployment claims for longitudinal regulation.

Boundary conditions

Best read as a field-level argument for architecture and interaction design in public smart buildings, especially where lived experience and social interpretation matter. It is less directly applicable to residential settings, large-scale automated control, or long-term sensing-heavy deployments.

Manual check: none

Position in field

The paper sits at the intersection of CHI, smart buildings, and architectural experience research. It extends comfort-centric smart-building discourse by proposing AfI as a design lens and by translating qualitative observations into reusable conceptual constructs.

Abstract

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.