Architecture as service: a case of design on demand (DoD)

Abstract

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) can facilitate a perception-driven architectural service. A highly personalized adaptive Architecture-as-Service (AaS), meeting individual demands and expectations, is an example of Design-on-Demand—as needed and when it’s needed. This goes beyond reactive smart environments in the direction of a dwelling’s anticipatory characteristics, i.e., adapting to changing requirements. For such an architecture to be possible, intelligent materials need to be integrated via the IoT in new structures adapted to life and work circumstance of our time. The IoT is the only practical implementation that can handle the large number of processes involved and connect to computational resources on the cloud. The personalized AaS is protected via blockchain technology and made available, on demand or according to what the context suggests. For this purpose, a decentralized autonomous organization is put in place. Distributed across a large array of various devices, the ledger representing the blockchain enables digital ownership and, more important, interactions without a central control. The data informing the project was acquired from experiments in a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE)-type virtual reality (VR) system. The same VR facility was used as a modeling medium for the future of a new kind of on-demand adaptive architecture.