Page 282 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

256 Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

l Augmented Reality: BHI can be easily integrated with advanced augmented
reality technologies such as Microsoft’s Hololens. Unlike conventional
virtual reality technologies augmented reality expands the potential of
what actually is by continuously providing viewers with a sense of “what
if.” As the potential for enhancing BHI exists in every project, augmented
reality is a perfect match, because it can provide users with a palpable
multisensorial experience of what a BHI-inspired future workplace or
retirement community will look and feel like.
l BHI Buildings and Sustainable Communities as Continuously Evolving
Living Environments: Smart technologies combined with BHI have the
capacity today to enable 21st century buildings and even older structures to
evolve physically along with their occupants. With an array of 21st century
technologies just now coming into the market, the design, materials,
electronics, and every other aspect of a structure can be organic, flexible,
adaptable, modular, reprogrammable, recyclable, and reconfigurable, in
ways that optimally reflect the enhanced BHI experience intended by its
imagineers, namely, clients, architects, planners, and users.

EVOLVING BUILDINGS WITHIN AN EMERGING NEW
PARADIGM IN GLOBAL HEALTH
Individual buildings and communities today, just like people, have a choice
whether to evolve in isolation or to affiliate with any number of emerging
Global Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs). One premier forum is the
World Health Innovation Summit (WHIS) based in the United Kingdom
(www.worldhealthinnovationsummit.com). WHIS is ideally positioned to
accelerate experimentation, testing, and differentiation of BHI design and
architectural principles in these 21st century workplaces and communities.
BHI provides not only a common language for easy communication of best
solutions rapidly across the WHIS network but also a common goal. Although
still a hypothesis, it seems highly plausible that the cascading effects in a
BHI-embodied COIN will accelerate and multiply; their penetration will be
deeper, wider, and richer; and the threshold inflection point will occur earlier,
especially in a COIN such as WHIS that itself embodies and nourishes the
creative energies of qi and love.
We are still early into the 21st century, and the warning signs are everywhere
of imminent nuclear, biologic, and economic catastrophes. And yet, at the same
time, we are poised for some of the greatest scientific and technological
advances the world has ever witnessed (Michelson, 2017). Hence as we look
backward over the centuries to these troubled times how happy we will be to
recall the marvels we achieved by artfully designing our future, harvesting the
prodigious power of our brains and also guided by the timeless wisdom of the
Heart.