10.2024–updated
H. Alavi
Hamed's research explores the future of human interactive experiences with built environments, with a particular focus on co-designing inclusive spaces both the building and urban scales.
At the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and the built environment, Hamed's design-oriented research is driven by two fundamental questions: What do we design for, and who do we design for? He investigates how future (smart) environments can embody the complexity of human diversity—not only physical and cognitive but also cultural and social. He also examines the human values that should guide research, design practices, and ultimately, policymaking in this domain.
Many smart environment projects are not necessarily moving in the right direction. For centuries, something as simple as opening or closing a window has provided remarkably sophisticated human experiences: to regulate temperature, light, air quality, acoustics, privacy, and even social interactions between indoor and outdoor spaces. However, the rise of automated smart building systems is set to transform this dynamic. What will be the consequences of such effciency-oriented smart agenda in built environmnets for the humans who inhabit them?
Methodologically, Hamed is interested in how HCI can contribute to the evolution of buildings and urban spaces as they increasingly integrate artificial intelligence, context-aware automation, and interactivity. He argues for shifting the focus from optimizing infrastructure to designing human experiences with and within built environments.
What are the specific attributes of building that Human-AI Interaction researchers should take into account when shifting attention and scale from "artefact" to "architecture", from usability to engagement, and from (often) short lifespan or discretionary to durable and immersive experiences? These and other questions that embody the complexity of our interactive experiences with built environments define the scope of Hamed's research, which he has been developing with the notion of Human-Building Interaction.
Selected Publications ︎
CHI.2023
The current mechanisms that drive the development of AI technologies are widely criticized for being tech-oriented and market-led instead of stemming from societal challenges. In Human-Centered AI discourses, and more broadly in Human-Computer Interaction research, initiatives have been proposed to engage experts from various domains of social science in determining how AI should reach our societies, predominantly through informing the adoption policies. Our contribution, however, seeks a more essential role for social sciences, namely to introduce discursive standpoints around what we need AI to be. With a focus on the domain of urbanism, the specific goal has been to elicit – from interviews with 16 urban experts – the imaginaries of how AI can and should impact future cities.Drawing on the social science literature, we present how the notion of imaginary has essentially framed this research and how it could reveal an alternative vision of non-human intelligent actors in future cities.
AI Beyond Deus ex Machina – Reimagining Intelligence in Future Cities with Urban Experts
CHI.2021
Repeated exposure to poor air quality in indoor environments such as office, home, and classroom can have substantial adverse effects on our health and productivity. The problem is especially recognized in closed indoor spaces shared by several people.On the other hand, sustainability concerns restrain the acceptable architectural methods for supplying fresh air in buildings.
We have studied the evolution of carbon dioxide level in office-meeting spaces, during 1007 meeting sessions. The collected data is employed to examine machine learning models aimed to indicate the CO2 evolution pattern and to forecast when fresh air should be supplied. In addition, to gain insight into the relations and interdependencies of social factors in meetings that may influence the users' perception of an interactive solution, we have conducted a series of online surveys. Building on the results of the two studies, a design solution is proposed that predicts the evolution of air quality in naturally-ventilated meeting rooms and engages the users in preventive actions when risk is forecast.
The Complexity of Indoor Air Quality Forecasting and the Simplicity of Interacting with It – A Case Study of 1007 Office Meetings
CHI.2020
The quality of air in office spaces can have far-reaching impacts on the well-being and productivity of office workers. We present a system, called Hilo, that capitalizes on machine learning methods to forecast the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in shared office spaces. Experimenting with Human-AI Interaction techniques, our main objective is to engage users in taking preventive actions when a harmful level of CO2 is predicted. We elicited three main elements of such prediction–Risk, Temporal Proximity, and Certainty– and explored alternative ways of displaying indoor CO2 forecast through these elements. Three interfaces on Apple Watch were tested by 12 participants (within-subjects, a total of 36 sessions). We describe the results of this study and discuss implications for future work on how to create an engaging interaction with the users about the quality of air in offices and particularly its forecast.Hilo-Wear: A Preliminary Study to Explore the Air Quality Forecast Interfaces in Office Space
TOCHI.2020
Since the introduction of the iconic Aware Home project in 1999, the notion of “living laboratory” has been taken up and developed in Human-Computer Interaction research. Many of the underpinning assumptions have evolved over the past two decades in various directions, while the same nomenclature is employed-- inevitably in ambiguous ways. This contribution seeks to elicit an organized understanding of what we talk about when we talk about living lab studies in HCI. This is accomplished through the methods of discourse analysis, a combination of coding, hypothesis generation, and inferential statistics on the coded data. Analysing the discursive context within which the term living laboratory (or lab) appears in 152 SIGCHI and TOCHI papers, we extracted five divergent strands with overlapping but distinct conceptual frameworks, labeled as “Visited Places”, “Instrumented Places”, “Instrumented People”, “Lived-in Places”, and “Innovation Spaces”.The Five Strands of Living Lab: A Literature Study of the Evolution of Living Lab Concepts in HCI
