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 Full Article]…

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 …[Read Full Article]…

Image: foxypar4 |Flickr

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 …[Read Full Article]…

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 …[Read Full Article]…

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 Full Article]…

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 Full Article]…

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 …[Read Full Article]…

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 …[Read Full Article]…

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 Full Article]…

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 …[Read Full Article]…