Designing Interfaces to Display Sensor Data: A Case Study in the Human-Building Interaction Field Targeting a University Community

• Main Authors: Ceccarini, C. (Author), Mirri, S. (Author), Prandi, C. (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI 2022
• Subjects: Architectural design; Building Information Modelling; Case-studies; Design cycle; human-building interaction; Human-building interaction; Information management; Intelligent buildings; Interaction fields; Interactive design; interactive design cycle; Interactive design cycle; interfaces; Iterative methods; sensors data; Sensors data; smart campus; Smart campus; Students; university community; University community; User interfaces
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 The increase of smart buildings with Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Building Management Systems (BMS) has created a large amount of data, including those coming from sensors. These data are intended for monitoring the building conditions by authorized personnel, not being available to all building occupants. In this paper, we evaluate, from a qualitative point of view, if a user interface designed for a specific community can increase occupants’ context-awareness about environmental issues within a building, supporting them to make more informed decisions that best suit their needs. We designed a user interface addressed to the student community of a smart campus, adopting an Iterative Design Cycle methodology, and engaged 48 students by means of structured interviews with the aim of collecting their feedback and conducting a qualitative analysis. The results obtained show the interest of this community in having access to information about the environmental data within smart campus buildings. For example, students were more interested in data about temperature and brightness, rather than humidity. As a further result of this study, we have extrapolated a series of design recommendations to support the creation of map-based user interfaces that we found to be effective in such contexts. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.