Thesis & Dissertations

Achieving human comfort in a space is an architectural necessity. Many Forms of human comfort are to be considered among which is visual comfort that could be optimized through controlling skin opening in architectural spaces. This has been facilitated by kinetic skins, which is a trend that has recently emerged as an integrated technology to the field of responsive architecture. However, the aim of this thesis is to optimize visual comfort in educational spaces using responsive kinetic skin as an effective mean for optimization. This will improve students’ productivity and enhance the overall quality of the educational environment. This attempt is to facilitate designers’ and architects’ ability to achieve more effective kinetic skin that could respond to daylight quantity and quality, and thus resulting in better visual comfort. This thesis attempts to highlight the relation between kinetic and daylight parameters and apply a series of scripts and simulations for several kinetic skin alternatives. Thus, An Add-on, a digital plugin is developed as an outcome to be presented through a friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) that can be easily used by architects.