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Fine Tune How Your Design Communicates

Have you ever thought about the speed of human thought and how that might relate to your architectural design?

Timing is everything. Both in the brain and throughout your architectural features, timing plays a critical role between the stimuli that your building puts out and the stimuli that your occupant’s brain receives. Why is this important?

Well, as an architect, you are the one who designs what those occupants engage with as they travel through your space. As each person absorbs the “information” that you put out, you are having an affect upon them — stirring them to move, feel, behave and think.

The composition that your features take on have both individual and cumulative effects — and you can use timing as a variable to further fine tune what you communicate through your design.

The “Space” Between Your Design and Your Occupant’s Thought

Part of what makes human consciousness possible is our brain’s ability to control the speed of our thoughts; and hence, incoming stimuli. Because of this, we are able to perceive our environment at once (in real-time). For example, if someone throws your keys across the room, you will see where they fall and hear were they fall. However, signals sent out by your brain’s core region (called the thalamus) act as “pacemakers” which ensure that such stimuli coming in from your eyes and ears is perceived simultaneously. (1)

As an architect, this should help you understand how important it is to design for your occupant’s various senses. Your occupants literally form impressions of your building by gathering stimuli through all of their senses as they journey through it. And although they perceive your architectural features in a synchronized way, it still does take time for the stimuli that your building sends out to travel from their eyes and ears for processing in their brain.

Hence, those movements, feelings, behaviors and thoughts that you help to stir…take time.

What does this mean for your architecture?

You should think about how your occupants travel through your design. What will they see, hear, touch, smell or even taste? How will you orchestrate your design so that Read more

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When traveling through space you use certain cues to help you navigate. Your senses help determine things like orientation, distance and direction. During navigation, many moments arise for decision-making and your brain is a key player during this process. Within a building, architectural features send signals during the navigation process. The brain uses sensorial cues to help you travel within an environment – providing you with enough information to find your way.

In the interesting article entitled Getting Lost for Better Architecture, occupants are said to navigate, interact and then form “cognitive maps” in order to understand location within space. This article describes how researchers tested human subjects by having them travel through a virtual building while recording their brain function. Ties were made between what the subject saw and their brain response to those signals.(1)

Such research is fascinating because findings reveal how humans experience space. For instance, this research uncovered that humans use the “angle of incoming sunlight” as a primary cue for navigation. Of course, within architecture this cue is often eliminated.(1)

You might wonder how occupants interact within their environment to find such navigational cues. For this, it is important to understand what goes into the mental mapping of an architectural space – forming a mental image of that space as it is experienced. Of course, a mental map is also a consequence of occupant decision-making during that experience. For this, we can also use virtual reality – to uncover how the decision-making process works within architecture in real-time.

Although the applications may seem endless, such research will definitely give architects greater understanding into how the human perceives architectural features. Findings are sure to be quite enlightening.

(1) Nelson, Bryn. Getting Lost for Better Architecture. MSNBC Dec. 15. 2008.