The Building That Teaches: Exploring Augmented Reality Affordances in Academic Incubators

Efforts to enhance the experience of interior environments have led to experimentation with augmented reality (AR) technology to encourage users to participate in the built space using their mobile devices. To investigate the role of AR technologies in interior design experiences, we highlight the interdisciplinary design of a mobile AR-application to assess and enhance the effectiveness of building design strategies for a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-Gold academic incubator. Drawing on user feedback data, observations, and in-depth interviews of 15 building occupants, we identified the affordances of mobile-AR for interior design. Our findings suggest approaches for contextualizing post-occupancy user feedback and interior design across the digital-physical spatial continuum and illustrate how AR has the potential to expand the goals of post-occupancy evaluations, beyond improved evaluation to enhancement, by allowing the building to teach occupants about resources while nudging them to utilize spatial features designed to enhance wellness. As hybrid interior environments are becoming more dependent on a convergence of the digital and physical, we found a series of strategies and practices for enhancing user experiences. A key contribution of our research is a framework, grounded in affordance theory, useful for designing and examining hybrid spaces at the intersection of AR and interior design.