Unconventional Investigations: Google's Chrisoula Kapelonis on a Human-Centric Approach, Interfaces for Living, and the Effects of Space
By Julia Gamolina
Chrisoula Kapelonis is an architect, strategist and technologist that works on the intersection of technology and the built environment. Her work is predominantly focused on enabling smart buildings and designing human-building interactions. She is currently at Google, working on the future of the intelligent home on the Nest team. Previously, she was a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, City Science Group where her work was focused on ambient computing and responsive environments.
Chrisoula is also formally trained as an architect, with a Master in Architecture II from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor in Architecture from CUNY City College.
JG: Tell me about your foundational years — where did you grow up and what did you like to do as a kid?
CK: I was really lucky to grow up in Astoria, NY — a really diverse and walkable part of Queens. As a kid I was obsessed with walking under these massive masonry arches from the rail line that ran through the neighborhood. It’s probably where my initial love for architecture and the built environment emerged from.
I lived in a multi-family home with my cousins and grandmother, so most of my childhood was really shaped by this dynamic — we did everything together and were each other’s biggest influences. At one point, my cousin and I started playing the Sims, and spent weeks just designing houses day after day together. Needless to say, we both ended up studying architecture in the end.
Google Nest products, courtesy of Google
Formal exploration of Receptive Skins pneumatic assembly
I can completely relate — my first all nighter was playing the Sims [laughs]. What did you learn about yourself in then studying architecture?
Deciding to study architecture was really a big process of self-discovery for me. In my first few years of undergrad, I pivoted back and forth between architecture and psychology quite a bit before finally settling on architecture at City College. I was initially resistant to architecture because the pedagogy felt so removed from the human experience, so psychology was a way for me to focus on the individual first.
Studying psychology really influenced me to take a more human-centric approach to the built environment and it completely reshaped my relationship with architecture. I spent most of my studies repelling the idea of space as a physical form, and approaching it more as an interface for living. There was always a joke amongst my friends that I could only truly design in plan, which is why my buildings never had roofs. I think this was truly reflective of my attitude towards architecture — buildings for me were more of a way to establish conceptual frameworks about human behavior in space, rather than the final product.
How did you get your start in the field? When did your focus pivot?
There was a moment in my undergraduate studies where I was working at a firm part time, and had the chance to continue after graduation. But when faced with that opportunity, I realized that I actually didn’t want to be an architect, but still wanted to engage in the world of architecture — so I applied to graduate school to figure that out. When I got into Harvard, I decided I would challenge myself to not design a building for the entirety of the two years, and rethink how I can design spaces with alternate mediums. I spent my time there designing wearables, building foldable robots, rethinking supermarkets, diving into brand strategy — all through the lens of the built environment. This period helped me realize that what I was really interested in, was the intersection of architecture and technology. That's when I decided my next step was the MIT Media Lab.
The allure of the Media Lab was that it was a place where people pursued unconventional investigations that span across disciplines, and Kent Larson’s City Science Lab, was definitely the right place for doing this for architecture. My research there was focused on pulling ideas from HCI to bring innovation to the built environment at the room scale and rethink the interfaces we have today. The Media Lab was really a melting pot of cross-disciplinary thinking, so a lot of my work was greatly influenced by other fields like material science, synthetic biology and hardware engineering thanks to my peers. Because of this, I was able to do research on some big challenges of the built environment and tackle them with new approaches — like robotic architecture, smart sensing wall materials, or autonomous pneumatics. For a while I thought I was repelling architecture, but being part of Kent’s lab made me realize I just needed a new toolkit for my investigations.
“I was initially resistant to architecture because the pedagogy felt so removed from the human experience, so psychology was a way for me to focus on the individual first...I spent most of my studies repelling the idea of space as a physical form, and approaching it more as an interface for living.”
Tell me how your work evolved, and you with it.
Initially my work was focused on the built form aspect of architecture as a way to create spaces for people, but now my investigations are much more focused on how the spaces can respond and adapt to human behavior. Space has such a profound effect on us — from how we feel, to how we sleep, to shaping our health. I’m much more interested in the environmental, interpersonal and phenomenological experiences people have in spaces, and understanding how to design intelligent interfaces that can adapt to support these journeys. Designing the physical form of buildings can only get you so far in this, and it’s really through technology and intelligence at the local scale that you can actually start to address this problem space.
Where are you in your career today? What is on your mind most at the moment?
For the past few years I’ve been working on the Nest team at Google, and have been focused specifically on designing for the smart home. This space is particularly interesting to me these days because of the potential for it to solve difficult operations challenges in buildings (like comfort, health, efficiency) with intelligence and automation. Designing for the smart home requires the same questions as when designing a building – ”what is this space programmed for,” “how do we support patterns of daily living,” “what needs do people have,” – but the approach is wildly different. Buildings are custom designed for a client, whereas the smart home needs to accommodate many different types of people, with different ecosystems, different living arrangements and different needs, at scale. Designing the the smart home is more akin to designing the large MEP systems that operate within buildings today – just at a hyper-local scale. And it’s both the sensing and actuation aspect of it that really excites me.
We have a difficult challenge on our hands with climate change, and the built environment is a large contributor to this problem. Building operations alone account for almost 30% of all yearly emissions. If we start to view the building as an interface, then there’s a real opportunity to rethink how we design, approach post-occupancy evaluations, and use technology to create better experiences, while also optimizing for performance and efficiency.
Axonometric of the EscPod assembly, City Science Lab
Spatial states the EscPod, City Science Lab
Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you manage through a disappointment or a perceived setback?
I can definitely say that one challenge in particular sticks out — mostly because it’s something I’ve experienced both in the architecture world as well in my recent years in interaction design. In my work, I’m guided much more by particular problem spaces, rather than specific roles or discipline boundaries. I’ve had to wear wildly different hats across my career as required by each project, but still remained focused on the same goals. In some environments this can become particularly challenging, especially when either the industry is less accustomed to experimentation, or there are specific expectations for each discipline. There have been many moments in my career, both during my studies and in industry where I’ve encountered this. But through that, I’ve learned to navigate resistance by building considerable trust with my partners, and using a shared language to communicate and solve things collaboratively. People are much less resistant to this kind of approach when they can understand the value they get in terms that they’re used to.
What are you most excited about right now?
I’m really obsessed with this idea of smart buildings being able to optimize themselves based on context. By making buildings more intelligent, we can really start to enable more efficient operations, and healthier and more comfortable environments for the people in them. There needs to be a feedback loop of sensing, understanding and responding to what is happening in a building to better suit the needs of the people inside them.
Matter, the new standard for the smart home is also something I’m particularly excited about. It feels a lot like a version of the graphic standards architects have had for decades, but for the smart home. Making smarter buildings more accessible, and the protocols more standardized has benefits both for users, and generally for innovation in this space.
“Space has such a profound effect on us — from how we feel, to how we sleep, to shaping our health. I’m much more interested in the environmental, interpersonal and phenomenological experiences people have in spaces, and understanding how to design intelligent interfaces that can adapt to support these journeys.”
Who are you admiring now and why?
Having just experienced two years of a pandemic, I’ve really become interested in how our buildings have become vectors of disease spread, and what we can do to reverse that, and invest in healthier buildings. Through this investigation, I’ve really grown strong admiration for all the building engineers, aerosol scientists, indoor chemists, public health leaders etc. that were advocating early on that COVID-19 was airborne, and that we need to adopt better ventilation and air quality standards for buildings to mitigate spread. This narrative has really brought the impact that buildings have on health to the forefront, and it's helped support a large amount of research and innovation that wasn’t as prominent in the industry before. I hope that moving forward, we can start adopting healthy building standards, similar to how the industry has in recent years has broadly adopted sustainability as a standard part of the practice.
Pneumatic wearable prototypes
Collaborator Carson Smuts with Spatial Flux prototype on Zero G flight, courtesy of Steve Boxall
What is the impact you’d like to have in the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?
Most of my career thus far has really been centered around this idea that architecture is missing a major part of its toolkit – and the right technology can enchant buildings with extraordinary abilities. I believe very strongly that adding the right kinds of intelligence to buildings can have a tremendous impact both on the experiences they afford, as well as how they support efficiency, comfort and health. Buildings today do not do this well, but there’s so much potential to shift our thinking as an industry and start to infuse technology as part of the semantics of architecture. My goal is to investigate how adding intelligence to buildings can go from being bespoke and difficult to implement, to being more accessible and scalable, so it can truly address the major challenges we have today. Having even a small impact on helping enable this sea change would be a success for me.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
Follow an idea, not a discipline. I feel this very strongly, and it’s guided every decision I’ve made.