Towards Empathic Buildings: Exploring How Smart Buildings May Be Designed to Address Occupants’ Subjective Needs

Given that people spend a significant amount of time within buildings, designing spaces while taking into consideration the impact that they may have on occupants’ well-being is a challenge. While architecture relies on design practices to elicit positive experiences among occupants, they may fall short in terms of sensing occupants and reciprocating their needs in an empathic manner. Therefore, in this position paper, we argue for empathic buildings that understand and respond to human emotions. We believe that buildings that can empathically interact with occupants will enhance occupants’ experiences of well-being in indoor spaces. To that end, we describe one such smart building that may be made human-centric through the incorporation of empathic technologies for various architectural attributes. We thereafter talk of an ongoing case study for identifying the novel, subjective human experiences that may be afforded by empathic buildings of the digital age.