Designing Human-Building Interaction through Reflective Human-AI Collaboration

This position paper is grounded in a Research through Design approach, drawing on the experience of the P@trimonia project, which explored the design of a mobile augmented reality application for heritage mediation in the historic center of Tunis (Tunisia). The paper addresses a central challenge in Human-
Building Interaction (HBI): supporting designers’ reflection when dealing with intangible interactions distributed across space and time, whose effects emerge progressively through end-users’ activities.
We argue that this challenge is primarily cognitive rather than a lack of technical tools. Building on Schön’s concept of reflection- in-action, we propose a cognitive model of Human-AI collaboration in which a design support system is conceived as a reflective cognitive artifact. Its role is to support designers’ reflexivity by making the potential consequences of design hypotheses open to discussion. In this model, designers’ agency is preserved and reinforced. The system does not replace human reasoning but expands the space of possibilities on which designers can reflect.