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 Read more

Image: ragnar1984 | Flickr

Buildings often rely upon wayfinding design to give their occupants a sense of building orientation, and to perhaps spark that mental map that tells them where they have been as well as pointing them in the direction of where they need to go. And while wayfinding signage and other directional elements found within buildings can be helpful, I do think that a good architectural design should not be dependent upon such signage. That is, the design should inherently convey to its occupants a sense of where they are when within it, and a sense of direction subtly instructing them on how to get to where they want to go.

For instance, an implied axial alignment of a well-positioned window which lets in a certain quality of light can pull an occupant in that direction if they sense it from another room. Another example is one of an exterior building element which wraps around the corner of a building in a way that pulls pedestrians toward the entrance as they are subtly cued to turn the corner.

Thus, within your designs there are ways to gently pull your occupants through, as they experience a harmonization of building orientation elements, where one leads to the next. And as such, designed building elements (as opposed to wayfinding signage) can be used as milestones to be experienced along your occupants’ journey. Additionally, such Read more

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 Read more

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 Read more

There is very interesting research going on right now which is indicating that there could be neural connections in the brain “between the senses (hence, sensorial stimuli) and intense memories”. (1)

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 Read more

Image: claude.attard.bezzina | Flickr

I came across an interesting article recently entitled Scent as Design. In it, the author discusses topics that were brought up during a recent symposium that was held to promote thought on the implications of using scent in design. To no surprise, it was shared that within today’s “modern lifestyle” we typically tend to “cover up” and “clean up” scent — without tapping into the vast potential which it holds. It seems that many of today’s cultures trend toward eliminating scent, without accentuating it — even though everything has a smell.

Just think about that for a moment, everything has a smell. Don’t you think that architects today should uncover what this widely underestimated sensorial stimuli can hold for their designs? But now that we know that the olfactory sense is significant, what should we begin to do as designers to make our creations even better?

When Scent Can Enhance the Visual

I was particularly struck by a particular thought from the above mentioned article that says that stimulating the olfactory sense in your design can help your occupants be more present. So, if your occupants were more present within your design — might your occupants function better and feel better when within it? Also, might the incorporation of scent help you as an architect attract Read more

The Film Sense (affiliate link)

What Neuroscience is Telling Us

When you design and integrate an architectural feature to engage your building occupant, how do you think it affects them? For example, suppose your occupant is walking toward your building and is just about to enter it — during their approach they can see a waterfall feature just on the other side of the glass which separates the exterior from the interior. How do they process your interior design before ever entering it? Do they actually hear that water feature on the other side of the glass which they can only see?

Such are the questions which leading neuroscientists are uncovering. In fact, findings are indicating that when people are presented with only a visual of something, they do actually hear it. So, even though that interior waterfall is acoustically cut off from the exterior, your occupants will still form a perception of it which is made up of processes beyond the visual.

In the article entitled The Brain Hears Just by Seeing in Scientific American, you can listen to a podcast which describes what is happening with the brain when visual cues stimulate auditory perceptions. You will learn that although people may just “see” something, like a rooster crowing, activity in the brain of the observer actually shows a “lighting up” in their audio cortex — similar to how it would light up if they were actually hearing it.

So as it turns out, the different human senses cross-relate and inform each other in some pretty sophisticated ways. This is something you should definitely understand as you design your built environments.

How to Take Findings about Synchronizing Senses a Step Further

A wonderful book which you should read is called The Film Sense (affiliate link) by Sergei Eisenstein. In it is discussed the notion of “montage” and what the merger between the senses (like sight and sound) means for an observer and director or designer.

I like this book because I think it is critical for you as an architect to understand how Read more

Image: fdecomite | Flickr

In a world where buildings today are primarily static, not very responsive and not very well optimized, it will be intriguing to see what algorithm design for architecture can do — particularly when coupled with other fields like nanotechnology, biomimicry and neuroscience.

As an occupant, I know I would want to have a building that can adapt to meet my needs as I need them. And while it does this, I would want it to look as beautiful as ever. As a building owner, I would want a building that could adapt to not only my business needs, but also be able to adapt to the changes that arise during my building’s lifespan.

Instead of reinventing the wheel by designing built forms that make their occupants adapt to them, it is my hope that algorithmic architecture combined nanotechnology, biomimicry and neuroscience can yield buildings that adapt to their occupants.

This new wave of building design can really make buildings more fluid, flexible and adaptively optimized to not only meet today’s rapidly evolving needs, but to also yield built space that is ultimately healthier, happier, less stressful and more resilient.

An algorithmic architecture will be a big part of the architecture field’s ability to open Read more

Image: JoshuaDavisPhotography. COM | Flickr

The notion of having dispositions, or records, that your brain keeps as it experiences architecture is quite an interesting thought. If every time your occupant has an architecture experience that can later be rewritten, then your role as an architect is to design for more than a real-time experience. You must also design for your occupants by incorporating what your architecture will say to them — what they will store in their memory, and how that memory will influence their future experiences.

Here is a quote discussing such dispositions from an article entitled, Science Studies How Architecture Affects the Brain:

“Architectural experience is recorded in what Antonio Damasio calls “dispositions” — records in our brain of a combination of sensory inputs, memories, emotions and any related muscle memories. Just below the surface of consciousness these dispositions wait for the next experience with which they can be paired. For example, each time we enter the office in which we work we are recalling a dispositional record of our last visit — including any emotional experiences we may have had. When we leave our office at the end of the day, our brain creates a new dispositional record that updates the one we came with that morning.”

The key word here is “update”. Previous architecture experiences impact the current, and the current will influence those which have not yet happened. Does this mean that you should design spaces that are less predictable? Or spaces where repetition and routine abound?

As an architect, it might be difficult to make a Read more

Will Your Design Vision Work?

So often, as a designer, you must think about how your design vision will impact your occupants — planning for a not-to-distant future where your vision will be realized and used. For this, you may rely heavily on your own experience of what you think works and what does not, and you may probe into your occupant’s life to understand their likes, dislikes and so on.

Still, there is so much left to simply “hoping” you made the right design decisions for your occupant; and it is time that will tell the success or failure of your built work. Yet, there are new and arising fields that can and will help your architectural design process, as you strive to make informed and talented decisions with your building designs — helping you to stand apart from the rest.

These fields include neuroscience, biomimicry and nanotechnology.

Image: Manky Maxblack | Flickr

Sharpen Your Innovative Edge

Eventually, new findings in neuroscience will meet head on with other rising fields like nanotechnology and biomimicry, and this meeting will certainly yield some new techniques for you, as an architect, to greatly expand upon (and in some cases completely revamp) what goes into your building design stages.

As it is, architects already must “predict” the future to some extent, but the best way to increase your probability of creating a successful design that works well is to learn more about Read more