Today’s article targets getting you to think about environment and memory, particularly for the aging population. As you design buildings within which the aging live, do you take time within your design process to think about solutions that will help them with their “aging” brains — thus, assisting them with certain aspects of their lifestyle, like suddden confusion, a missplacing of the keys, or other distracted behaviors?

You have often heard me speak about narrative, and this is because it is an important tool for you as a designer to use in order to pick up on the nuances that make up the daily lives of your building occupants. By better understanding your occupant’s “story”, you are better able to design appropriate solutions that will make for maximum positive benefit in their lives.

And for the aging, an environment can make a positive difference when it is better organized, uses appropriate colors and materials, and provides for easy accessibility as aging building occupants move about to function within their space. But appropriate design for the aging should not stop there.

You see, as the brain ages, working memory begins to decline — that is, incidents of forgetfulness, confusion, or distracted attention become more prevalent. So, how can you as a designer create environments to combat this decline?

If you are designing environments in which the aging will live and function by engaging in their daily activities, you should take a close look at the narrative of their lifestyle. Take “snapshots” of a typical day, to better understand where their strengths and weaknesses are. Then, solve for the obstacles and constaints that show up. For instance, if they are involved with any type of medical regiment (or diet/exercise regiments for that matter), make sure to design a space not only within which such care can be practiced, but with which it is practiced.

Use your design to make their lives not only easier because of what they struggle to do, but also more enriched because of what they do well. Also, pay attention to the things they want to do, but have not been able to do for a while. Find ways to use the design of their environment to make possible what may not have been possible in their “other” space. You aren’t just designing a building, you are designing architecture that makes a positive difference.

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: magnetbox | Flickr

By simply looking at Japan’s subway system in the image to the right, would you imagine that a person living in this type of city would respond differently to stress as compared to a person living in the countryside? Well, research is indicating that there may just be differences between urban and city dwellers, involving how they handle stress. And furthermore, such differences may be most prominent when considering where a person grew up: whether in an urban or country area. (1)

Thus, when you design a building or residence, how might you think about its design in different terms (from a sensory design standpoint) as you take note of whether it is being used by a city or country dweller? Would such findings indicate that you as an architect need to consider designing for stress (and what yields happiness) with a bit more focus in urban environments? And might one assume that achieving such relaxation within urban environments is a bit more difficult for those urban dwellers? Also, what other demographics do you need to consider when honing in upon the perfect lifestyle architecture for your building occupant?

For instance, I find it interesting to think that a home, office, or school would call for different design elements depending upon whether it is built within the city or country. Of course, populations within each will have their own inherent cultures, and subsequent styles that they prefer. But what if you are designing a home in the city for someone that grew up in the country? It is interesting to think that your design would need to be different than if you are designing for someone that was a lifelong native to the city.

Thus, as you embark into your initial architectural design phases, be sure to look beyond what you see at face value when analyzing what your occupant will need as well as what your design will be able to do for your occupant. And if you are designing a building that will be used daily, as with lifestyle architecture, be sure to consider your occupants’ past as well as their future goals.

In the end, it is all about honing an architectural design into an environment where your occupants will thrive because it was built specifically for them — factoring in all of their strengths and weaknesses.

(1) A New York State of Mind. The Economist. June 23rd, 2011.

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

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In recent lab tests, studies are showing that it is possible to replay memories within a rat’s brain to restore its memory. By using an implant, signals are sent to the hippocampus part of the brain by recording and replaying electrical activity of neurons. (1) Here is a brief excerpt describing this process a bit more:

This implant operates on the same principles as other neural prosthetics, communicating with the nervous system using electrical signals. Instead of sending signals from the brain to control a prosthetic arm or a computer cursor, however, this system sends the signals to another part of the brain. (1)

So what does this have to do with architecture you may ask?

In thinking about how architecture affects the humans that experience it, I wonder what effects on the brain such buildings as museums, memorials, ruins or other historical buildings might bring. And in this line of thinking, I would like to know how architectural symbols impact architectural perception — whether that architecture is meant to represent an event (present , past, or future), a thing or even a person.

Is designing and building an architectural symbol a way to “replay a memory”?

In theory, such architectural symbols have opportunity to teach memories, where a collective event, or a relationship can be better understood, explored further and even built upon.

When you design, do you ever consider what within your work might become such an architectural symbol? Even if it is not an overt grand gesture like the Taj Mahal, perhaps even a significant detail within your architectural built work might serve as a symbol for someone that experiences your building. And in the end, that does give it a form of meaning.

If so, ask yourself what your architectural symbols mean to your building occupant? What is it that they “replay” in their memories (whether positive or negative). Then understand why and how those architectural moments work. After all, by dissecting what about your architectural designs become symbolic for people, you will take on a much deeper understanding about what your current architectural designs are doing for your occupants, as well as how to build upon them in your future projects.

So in the end, perhaps architectural symbols are one way to replay a memory for occupants. How can you use this to your advantage as an architect? And at what times would you choose not to?

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(1) Ross, Valerie. Brain Implant Restores Memories in Rats by Recording & Playing Them Back. Discover. June 20, 2011.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: imag ine that | Flickr

Studies are being carried out that suggest that the brain uses vibration (touch) and frequency (sound waves), in a manner that unites these two senses. This means that if a person is good at sensing touch vibrations, then they are also good at hearing sound frequencies — and vice versa. Thus, the senses of touch and sound in architecture are linked, and you as an architect can use this information to make your building designs even better.

I would like to think that architects today are factoring human senses, so that at various points within their design, occupants are invited to use their senses — in a holistic and harmonic way, making architecture greater than the sum of its parts. This is an advantage to designing with the senses in mind, where your architecture can speak to its occupants through different languages and on many levels. And the amazing finding here is that those sensory languages are related to one another in unexpected ways, where your occupants can “feel sound”. (1)

Image: Mataparda | Flickr

Of course, this immediately highlights the importance of paying attention during design phases to the sound and touch senses (and not solely relying on the visual sense to realize your design vision). Additionally, these findings also illustrate how you should not treat each of the senses as separate entities within your design, but rather as different languages that speak to one another, play off of one another and help each other out to paint a clearer picture about what is experientially happening.

In order to make best use of such findings that link the senses together, I would start by asking yourself questions about your building project design, like…

3 Key Questions to Ask Yourself That Can Increase Your Design’s Potential

1. Do any mechanical systems or electrical systems within the building create physical vibrations and/or noise frequencies that interfere with ongoing activities and behaviors that your occupants engage in? Very simply, this could mean that a loud HVAC system, for example, might interfere with inter-office communication within an office building. Or perhaps, certain building vibrations seem to amplify ambient sounds making it more difficult to concentrate along with increased stress while working.
2. I would also ask yourself about what opportunities you have been missing in your designs by not thinking about the senses as related to one another. Perhaps there is a great opportunity within your museum design, for instance, to create a meaningful and memorable point about a certain exhibit or cultural emphasis. By appealing to different sensory modalities, your occupants will better connect and engage with their surroundings — by better absorbing, interacting and remembering that which they learn in your buildings.
3. Another time to consider the overlapping between the senses of touch and sound in architecture is when creating an event design either within your long-standing building project or within your one-time event installation. In either case, it can be extremely powerful to take advantage of multiple sensory languages within your design — just imagine a theater, stadium or arena design. Of course, in these cases many designers already do consider the visual with acoustic to create amazing effects. But what about those vibration frequencies felt by an audience? And will what they physically touch right around them affect their perception of the event that is live on the somewhat distant stage.

Additionally, it is helpful to consider that where your occupants hear something, they will have increased sensitivity to feeling something by touching, such as an architectural building material. To explain more about how this works, please read the following excerpt from Devin Powell’s article:

“Other researchers have shown that hearing a sound can boost touch sensitivity. […] Frequency may be a two-way street in the brain that unites these two senses, says Jeffrey Yau, a neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. A vibration that has a higher or lower frequency than a sound, he found, tends to skew pitch perception up or down. Sounds can also bias whether a vibration is perceived.” (1)

Image: Marcus Vegas | Flickr

Touch and Sound in Architecture Can Strengthen Your Building Design Intent

So to make your architectural space the best it can be, consider how your occupants sense it through their different modalities — but do not just consider them separately from one another. Think about how each affects the other, where in this case touch affects hearing and hearing affects touch. Then you can consider what happens when your occupant sees and hears at the same time. Ask yourself if what they hear complements what they see or what they feel through touch. If they are not strategically designed with that in mind, a lack of harmonization can deter your design vision from being realized by your occupant. So, be careful not to reduce the beauty or effectiveness of your design, and thus, make it more difficult for your occupant to function healthfully within it. Think of the different sensory modalities as you design to better achieve your overall design intent and potential.

(1) Powell, Devin. What it means to Feel the Noise – Scientists Explore Overlapping Sensations of Sound, Touch. Science News. May 26, 2011.

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I would really like to get your feedback on my post today, so please leave me a comment in the form below. And if you enjoyed it, make sure you share it with your Twitter and Facebook followers by clicking on the “re-tweet” and “like” button at the beginning of this page.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: D'Arcy Norman | Flickr

Architects often look at where their occupants travel within their building, what makes them decide to go wherever they are going, and what behaviors they engage in once they arrive. But what actually happens to building occupants as they move through your building? Does the speed at which they move through your building have impact on their experiences while they are there? And upon how those experiences are remembered?

In a recent research article published by Science Daily, it was cited that the Society for Neuroscience studied and found evidence that “activity in rats’ memory-related brain areas varies with how quickly they move to explore their environments”. (1) So, for our purposes, we can begin to deduce that the speed at which a subject moves, can alter their memory of the setting within which they moved. (1)

Here is a slightly more detailed description of why this happens in the first place:

“They found that the pathway associated with storing and consolidating memories was most active when the animals moved slowly. At faster speeds, the balance shifted from these circuits to circuits bringing in info from the outside world.” (1)

Speeding Your Occupants Up Versus Slowing Them Down

So, within your own building projects, how might you go about designing for the way in which your occupants move? And what about your design solutions might benefit them as they engage in their real-time activities within your building?

First, you must ask yourself how you would go about slowing them down versus speeding them up as they travel to and fro within your built environment. For instance, might putting in a sloping floor impact their travel speed and behavior? Might there also be impact if you changed the material composition, color or pattern with which the floor is made? And by juxtaposing the rising and declining slopes, while also transitioning between flooring materials, might that serve as a “friction” or “smoothing” process that would yield different occupant travel speeds?

On the other hand, you could take a more generalized approach, where perhaps, a change in lighting color, strategically positioned architectural features, or a certain amount of contemplation or learning space might serve to give building occupants more to sensorially take in, and thus, causing them to linger. Whereas having a more subdued design fabric that is more goal-oriented and efficiency-based might make occupants move about more quickly.

Of course, this all could be taken to an uncomfortable extreme — if perhaps an architectural space has a superfluous amount of design activity that becomes too busy, and in fact, overwhelms occupants.

The Journey Your Occupants Take and The Memories That Form

In the end, speed of occupant travel really impacts the behaviors that they engage in once within a space, thus impacting the benefits they get from those behaviors. Subsequently, memories are formed, and as the Society of Neuroscience study implies, the way in which they are stored is now thought to be determined significantly by their motion and speed.

So, how can you as an architect begin to apply all of this to your work?

Perhaps within your designs you can re-assess the overall intended function that you are planning to hone in upon within your designs. Then, you can assess what role memory will play both while your occupants are engaging in their behaviors and once they have left the space. For instance, will learning be a key component while within your space? If so, at what spatial and experiential points within your design do you want your occupants to learn? How will you get them there? What will they do while they are learning to help them with memory formation (which is linked with learning)? And how will you design for the way in which they leave?

As a preliminary step, I would recommend assessing whether it be beneficial for your occupants to engage in a more exploratory travel experience within your building, or a more targeted goal-driven one. Think about how much they might need to absorb while they are there, and what they should remember once they have left. Then think of ways that you might design for all of this — floor slope, feature materials, lighting colors, goal-driven versus contemplation space, and so on.

In short, think about what your occupants actually engage in while within your building, then think about their “motion” while engaging in those behaviors — both of these will impact what they remember, and that may very well push your architecture from being simply good, toward being great.

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——–

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: erix! | Flickr

An interesting finding involving one of the ways in which people decide to take action, can be traced back to how long a person spends looking at each of the choices. As was reported in an article by Scientific American, called Buying Odds Increase for Products That Are Looked at Longer, shoppers within a store that are trying to decide between two items will ultimately choose the item which they looked at longest. By tracking their subject’s eye movements, researchers determined that items were chosen when the subject gazed upon the item they chose even just half a second longer. And this was the case 70 percent of the time.

Which Architectural Elements in Your Design are Time Sensitive?

If you think about this premise that what a subject gazes upon longest, ultimately plays a large role in how they make decisions and take action, then architecture has many places within which such a finding can provide great insight into how to leverage not only architectural design aesthetic, but also its ability to bring great value for its occupants. But one must ask…At what point does design for perception become design toward persuasion? And how can you as a designer use each to bring value to your occupants?

Think about this for such buildings as hospitals or schools, where so many decisions and choices are made everyday by people that work there, heal there or learn their. Then think for a minute about where within your designs you give occupants a design choice — like between taking an elevator, escalator or stairs. Might it be healthier for certain occupants to choose one over the other? And when?

In the end, this may be a primary purpose of an architectural feature that enhances a space, while at the same time being somewhat of a focal point. And when strung together, such architectural features make up the narrative of moments that lead to the choices that occupants make throughout their architectural journey — and hence, their decisions that make up their daily lives.

How might you incorporate such studies that give insight to your occupant’s possible eye tracking based behaviors, and the time they take to gaze at different architectural moments within your building? How might you use such findings to bring greater value to your occupants? Would you emphasize certain architectural features over others? And why?…To help them make healthier choices? To help them teach and learn better? Or to help meet your client’s overarching needs in more meaningful ways?

Please Tell Me What You Think

I would really like to get your feedback on my post today, so please leave me a comment in the form below. And if you enjoyed it, make sure you share it with your Twitter and Facebook followers by clicking on the “re-tweet” and “like” button at the beginning of this page.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: Jan Tik | Flicker
School children's game teaches links between math and music.

As you design for your building occupant’s age, should you as a designer get more detailed and perhaps more personalized by understanding and incorporating information about your occupant’s brain age — or brain power, strengths and weaknesses between their networked connections? (1) After all, “age” as we know it today is a relative term, a catchall within which so many occupant characteristics are lumped together. But what if we as designers could incorporate new understanding about what makes up a certain age — with all of its dimensions?

Well interestingly enough, researchers are now able to gather data relating to how “mature” a brain is within a person. So no longer might you only need to think of your occupants as being a male or female that is 25 or 60. Instead, as you integrate better personalization within your adaptive sensory building designs, you can begin to design for specific brain strengths and weaknesses that your given occupant may have.

To give you a better idea of how researchers collect such data, you can read the following description as follows:

After the data were collected, the researchers fed the brain activity information for each person to a computer, which assessed hundreds of features simultaneously and spit out a score reflecting the “brain age” of the subject. This score was based on how activity in each region of the brain correlated with the activity in all the other regions. In this way, the researchers described the properties of brain connectivity for each of the 238 subjects, and constructed a curve showing how this score goes up over the years.

— From the article: Defining Normal in the Brain (1)

A Building Design that Empowers Your Occupants

Of course, when you begin to consider an occupant’s brain age, you may begin to wonder how specific and personal you should get with regard to really honing in and then tuning your building system design to your occupants. I think the question here lies in your ability to target the heart of what your building’s functions and aesthetics are aiming to do to get their occupant to their intended goals. Hence, you must figure out their purpose — and perhaps work backwards from this core design problem — using what you know about your occupant’s brain age (thus, where their brain power resides) to carve out a more tailored path where their built environment can help them when and where they need it most.

So for instance, if you are designing a school, you may need to consider what specific milestones exist for the brain maturity of your occupants/children for any given classroom. Then, in knowing what standard versus atypical brain strengths and weaknesses exist for those particular age groups, you are better equipped to design classrooms that really hone in to target not only the way those learning children perceive, but also increase their opportunities and potential for optimal learning.

As an architectural designer, you will benefit from gaining knowledge about the inner workings of your occupants in relation to your specific building types (and their purposes). One way of doing this is to know what level within their development process your occupants are in and how best to tap into their inner resources to further propel them toward their own goals.

The trick is to not bombard yourself with an overflow of design information, but to know how to use such information to not only better your designs, but to better engage and empower those occupants which they serve.

Please Tell Me What You Think

I would really like to get your feedback on my post today, so please leave me a comment in the form below. And if you enjoyed it, make sure you share it with your Twitter and Facebook followers by clicking on the “re-tweet” and “like” button at the beginning of this page.

(1) Sanders, Laura. Defining Normal in the Brain. Science News. Sept. 2010.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: bedzine | Flickr

When it comes to architectural design, most emphasis is placed on what happens within buildings while occupants are awake, active and being productive as they engage in their wide range of daily human behaviors. But as an architect, you must step back and ask yourself what makes all of this activity and behavior possible for your occupants? What helps them to maintain their proper amount of focus and energy while also being creative and productive as they engage in their daily activities — even down to a physiological level.

Well, a critical and important factor which helps humans to perform optimally is none other than sleep. And where is this mostly carried out? In homes, in hospitals, in hotels and even less obvious places like boarding schools.

While achieving good design in all of these places is important in terms of helping occupants with their everyday wakeful tasks and activities, it is also important for you to know that REM sleep during the night is critically important for your occupants to achieve in order to help make not only their overall health better, but also to maximize their function and outlook for the next day like creativity, productivity and so on.

Quote from Science Daily article entitled Memory Researchers Explain Latest Findings on Improving the Mind:

“REM sleep is important for pulling together all the information we process on a daily basis and turning it into memories we can use later,” said Mednick. “This helps us to understand more about the benefits of sleep and to help people maximize their sleep schedules for optimal productivity in memory retrieval.”

How Might You Design for a Better Night’s Sleep?

When you think about adaptive architecture, you need to engage in the narrative and processes that make up your occupants’ daily lives — and then, within your design you need to not only account for their routine schedules, but also allow for variations within those schedules. Just as proper lighting is important within your design to harmonize with your occupants circadian rhythm, the olfactory, aural and touch senses can also be used within architectural design to help get your occupants to that deeper level of REM sleep during the night.

For starters, as an architect you may need to look at what obstacles are preventing your occupants from sleep and then get rid of those. Within a hospital, for instance, it is reported that good sleep is very difficult for patients to achieve because of the rolling carts in the hallways and the opening and closing of room doors during nightly patient checks. By just finding solutions for these seemingly simple problems, you as an architect can greatly contribute to helping those patients heal faster and better by simply giving them a better quality of rest during the night.

Within a hotel, we see a lot more option in terms of comfort than might typically exist within a hospital design. Within a hotel room an occupant might experience nice lighting to help them read a good book before bed, a well-placed television in case they need a distraction before sleeping, darkening curtains and filtering room shades to help prevent street light (or early morning light) from streaming into the room and waking the occupant up. And also, part of getting a good night’s sleep might be in the preparation — at some hotels, they provide nice robes, slippers or a “good night” snack simply to create a relaxation kind of mood.

As an architect, you should take the time to get to know your future building occupants — knowing not only what they do during the day, but also what they need to do to prepare for the night, and to achieve a good and restful night of sleep. Do not waste this incredible way to leverage your design talents. For, what good is the most amazing architectural design that can help your occupant be highly proactive during the day, if they are just too tired to make good use of it because a poor design helped them to get a restless night of sleep. Don’t let your design fall short.

Please Tell Me What You Think

I would really like to get your feedback on my post today, so please leave me a comment in the form below. And if you enjoyed it, make sure you share it with your Twitter and Facebook followers by clicking on the “re-tweet” and “like” button at the beginning of this page.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Instinctively, do you this such connections exist? Have you ever listened to a song and instantly been transported back to a certain time and place in your memory that this song seems to be unexplainably linked to? Or have you ever walked into a room that has a certain smell which instantly reminds you of an experience you had a long time ago? Or what about seeing something that triggers your memory, reminding you of a conversation you once had or a place you once visited? And in each case, did an emotion surface as a result of the sensorial memory trigger? Well, such is the research by neuroscientist Benetto Sacchetti which focuses on those possible “links” which are like narrow bridge-like connections tying together emotional memory and the senses.

If there were such a neural “link”, what would this mean for you as an architect and your building design? Would you purposefully embed certain smells in a school to encourage comforting home-like emotional ease to help foster learning? Or might you play certain sounds (or songs) while at work to help boost productivity and/or creativity to yield more frequent and better quality results with less stress?

It is important for you to realize that such positive outcomes can result from the materials and other sensorial stimuli you put into your buildings — especially in the details. Thus, certain material properties, lighting displays and even geometric architectural arrangements are likely to serve as acute triggers for powerful emotions in occupants. Through their senses and into their emotional memory, you can think of the effect of an inspirational museum or a touching memorial where architectural moments lead visitors on a journey through their senses and into their emotional memory.

In other words, as an architect, you need to understand that what you put in, you will get out…and this will have either a positive or negative effect (with consequences) for your occupant.

Of course, designing to purposely trigger memory can be a tricky thing, and some may say that it is an art to be able to do this well — and at a high level. So, even if there is a definitive link between the senses and emotional memories which they may bring to the surface, I think it is your job as an architect to act as a surgeon at times, knowing how to extract and guide those memories within your designs, so they can resurface, form, be realized, felt and appreciated by your occupants.

As an architect, with the right ingredients, you can create such a vessel — delivering the right environmental stimuli to the senses, and thus, triggering not only memory, but also profound emotion.

Please Tell Me What You Think

I would really like to get your feedback on my post today, so please leave me a comment in the form below. And if you enjoyed it, make sure you share it with your Twitter and Facebook followers by clicking on the “re-tweet” and “like” button at the beginning of this page.

(1) Found: Possible Link Between Emotional Memories and Sensory Triggers. Discover.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: geraintandkim | Flickr

In a recent Boston Globe article entitled Researchers Say Sense of Touch Guides Impressions, it was found that the sense of touch really is an important factor when it comes to perception. As you may already infer, we all seem to use an initial impression of something to form a judgment — which, when needed, helps us make a decision. (1) But what factors do we all rely on when we are in the midst of making that decision, and forming a judgment?

Not surprisingly, this is one of the important questions that was asked by the team of researchers headed by Joshua Ackerman of the Sloan School of Management, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where together, his team was trying to find the connection between our bodies and our minds. They did this by using objects with different “weights, textures and harnesses” as they questioned and observed their subjects…”people passing on the street near MIT or Yale”. (1)

Here is a brief review describing three of their studies:

While holding clipboards (where some are heavy and some are light), subjects where asked to review a resumé (resting on the clipboard) and make decisions about whether that particular job applicant was serious about the given position. — Subjects associated heavy clipboards with more serious job applicants. (1)

While witnessing a “back-and-forth” between two people, subjects were asked whether it was friendly or problematic. — Subjects who had just been working on a puzzle with rough edges saw it as problematic. (1)

Subjects sitting in hard chairs (versus soft cushioned comfortable chairs) where more rigid in their negotiations over the price of a car. (1)

I think Ackerman said it best as he noted that, “[l]anguage shows the connections we make between physical and mental experiences through metaphors”. (1) What a wonderful picture to paint as the link between not only body and mind is made evident, but the connection between our sense of touch and our ability to make decisions through judgment is made clearer. In short, there are many times we cannot help but default to our sense of touch as we form impressions about the situations which surround us. And as Ackerman notes, this may be due to the fact that our sense of touch is one of the first senses to develop in babies.

Listen To What Your Occupants Say — Metaphorically Speaking

In the end, I think about how important it is to understand this mind-body connection, and the role that our sense of touch has, not only as we navigate through the world, but as architects that hope to improve it through design — like in the understanding of something so seemingly simple, like the hardness or softness of the cushion of a chair.

Just as in Ackerman’s study where job candidates were judged based not only on their resumé, but also on the weight of the clipboard which holds that resume (1), you also should take note as an architect; for those “simple decisions” about materiality can go way beyond texture — you should also consider things like temperature, weight, softness and so on.

Of course, when you stop to think of how many things your occupants will touch during the course of experiencing your building either one time, or everyday, it becomes staggering when you come to the realization that the simple decisions you make really can enhance or detract from a given situation experienced within your building design.

Image: D_P_R | Flickr

The cupola seen here (in this German government building) is said by some to be a metaphor for the transparency of the German government.

To help you with this, I suggest that you start to listen to your client’s and occupants’ use of language when describing their experiences within your building. Furthermore, listen to the metaphors in their language. For instance, your occupant saying that your “building was cold” or a “room was heavy” might give you some clues that you can link to their behavior (and sense of touch), when within your design.

It is through language that you as an architect can begin to decipher that link between what your occupants physically use and how that informs not only their judgments and decisions within your space, but also reflects back into their overall impression and perception of their entire experience within your building.

Please Tell Me What You Think

I would really like to get your feedback on my post today, so please leave me a comment in the form below. And if you enjoyed it, make sure you share it with your Twitter followers by “tweeting” it using the re-tweet button on this page.

—— Reference:
(1) Cooney, Elizabeth. Researchers Say Sense of Touch Guides Impressions, Decisions. The Boston Globe. June 25, 2010

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman