Designing Media Architecture: Tools and Approaches for Addressing the Main Design Challenges

Media Architecture is reaching a level of maturity at which we can identify tools and approaches for addressing the main challenges for HCI practitioners working in this field. While previous influential contributions within Media Architecture have identified challenges for designers and offered case studies of specific approaches, here, we (1) provide guidance on how to tackle the domain-specific challenges of Media Architecture design -- pertaining to the interface, integration, content, context, process, prototyping, and evaluation -- on the basis of the development of numerous installations over the course of seven years, and thorough studies of related work, and (2) present five categories of tools and approaches -- software tools, projection, 3D models, hardware prototyping, and evaluation tools -- developed to address these challenges in practice, exemplified through six concrete examples from real-life cases.