Adaptive Building Skin Systems: A Morphogenomic Framework for Developing Real-Time interactive Building Skin Systems

Morphogenomics, a relatively new research area, deals with the intricacies of morphological informatics. It is closely linked with the term morphogenesis (from the Greek morphe? - shape and genesis - creation), which deals with the study of the development of form during its early cellular stages in developmental biology. Morphogenomics, however, focuses upon the informatics constituent behind the emergence of diverse morphologies. This informatics constituent specifically involves studying the structure, behavior, and interactions of natural and artificial systems that store, process and exchange information. This paper presents a design-research framework for applying this Morphogenomic agenda to create context-aware performative building skin systems. These real-time adaptive building skins are developed as bottom-up parametric formations of real-time information processing, inter-dependent, ubiquitously communicating components, the collective behavior of which, leads to the creation of continually performative systems. The framework of adaptations for these building skins specifically corresponds to three domains of adaptation: structural, behavioral and physiological, resulting in kinetic adaptability, energy generation and conservation as well as transport and usage principles and material property based changes per skin component. An evaluative study comprising four experiments for developing performative skins is conducted in a time-frame of four months. The developed skins adapt in real time via operating upon ubiquitous communication and data-regulation protocols for sensing and processing contextual information such as air, water, sunlight and user proximity. These experiments and analysis based on developing intrinsic inter-dependencies between contextual data, structure and material logistics thus lay the foundation for a new era of continually performing, self powering, real-time adaptive intelligent building skin systems. The performative building sk- in systems thus have a wide range of applicability in the domain of adaptive applications in the AEC sector, self adaptive behavior and topology and context-aware adaptation thus resulting in a methodical conception of adaptive environments.