What Do We Design for When We Design "Smart Buildings"? A Scoping Review of Human Experience Design Research in Buildings

Built environments increasingly incorporate new forms of intelligence, creating opportunities for enhancing human interactive experiences with and within building spaces. This scoping review examines design interventions and discourses within the domain of "Smart Buildings". The goal is to identify and characterise the type of human experiences that research in this domain aims to address. Using a hybrid deductive-inductive coding approach, we analysed 192 papers related to human experiences and smart buildings from ACM Digital Library and Scopus published between 1996 and 2024. Our analysis revealed 11 distinct "targeted human experiences", 20 commonly used "design mechanisms"to achieve those design goals, as well as two typologies of "technological interventions". Our findings create a foundation for understanding building design research and the range of human experience they entail.