Gaming Architecture for Neuroscience

Can gamification be a design solution that allows us to integrate neuroscience into the design disciplines?

by R.S.Steenblik

With the death of Zaha Hadid, her canceled proposal for the Tokyo Olympics, and the announcement by Chinese president Xi Jinping of “no more weird architecture”, I believe we are at the end of an era. Pragmatism is regaining its footing after the digital revolution has allowed imaginations and buildings to run wild. I believe that there were good ambitions at the heart of such an era. To some degree those ambitions were successful in accomplishing at least part of what it set out to accomplish: inspire people through amazing spaces.

Image by Deezen 

I share that ambition. When I was working on my bachelors degree I wrote a somewhat naive ambition: "the environments that I create will be spaces of change for the better. Places where scientific discoveries happen, places where people fall in love, places where great organizations are created, and causes identified and championed. I want to create the places where the next Einstein is taught Newton’s Laws. Where his E=mc2 is epiphanized." This statement reminds me of Giuseppina Ascione’s ambitious call for a balanced approach to designing using principles of Human Centered Design. From where I sit now, it is easy to get lost in the minutia and to forget what my original motivations were.

The overlap between neuroscience and architecture provides a small glimpse back into my initial ambition. In order to get there, I believe that questions about the logistics or the process of a neuroscience / architecture collaboration are on the minds of thinkers and practitioners around the world.

Often, the more experts that are involved the more inefficient the process becomes. Yet as a person who appreciates complexity, I imagine the perfect client who would be willing to bring experts on from many disciplines to capture the nuances from each background to achieve magnificence: All the standard architectural consultants plus and UX designer, human dynamics engineer, ergonomics engineer, industrial designer, Historian, Artists, Neuro/physiological expert, Data scientist, Urban Planner, Feng Shui expert, cyclical ecologist, etc.

Yet such an accumulation might infer that a government agency with all of its bureaucratic processes would have to be behind it. It could easily become a never ending project that doesn't actually do what you had hoped (or possibly at an inflated cost). Another approach might be presenting itself through gamification and peer to peer problem solving. Can gamification be a design solution that allows us to integrate neuroscience into the design disciplines?

Gropius will get an answer: There is a science of design!

There is a frantic activity going on over new guidelines to design quality buildings and urban spaces. Events, conferences, grants are arranged almost simultaneously and often ignoring each other, causing a kind of energy loss that sometimes hinders the collaboration between different disciplines or between interdisciplinary teams. It seems they tend to highlight diverging points instead of take advatage of the common fields, maybe because there is still confusion about which scientific references should be engaged. 

Walter Gropius

Just in the first half of this year there are London, where he has just finished Conscious Cities, San Diego, where the ANFA opens to new research studies to be presented at its International Conference next September. Seattle will soon be home of a summit that seals a marriage between Living Building Challenge and the research institute Terrapin, center of Biophilic Design, and in the meanwhile Rick Fedrizzi, perhaps conscious of the limits that LEED credits may have over occupant's wellness within a buiding, opens the door to the WELL Building Standard. 

There are also other research initiatives, among which the neuroarchitecture research "ROOMS" (IUAV among its main partners), that may be considered a "global" and "diagonal" initiative . Rooms tries to overcome economic and bureaucratic obstacles through an original model of crowdfunding that allows everybody (designers and users) to be involved in the investigation. 

What emerges from this phenomenon is the need to perform a change of gear in the world of design and its own way of doing research. Research no longer dwell within the walls of Accademy, but begins to be swallowed up by the business world and its appetite for smart investments, whose purpose is "ethical" rather than purely about profit. It is disoriented, and at the same time creates disorientation in those who have so far considered it a firm and safe reference in research. Universities have got the feeling of a new wave coming, although most of them, expecially in Europe, are trying to adapt and proceed with elephantine pace, worried of contamination and identity change.

Journal of Design and Science

Very breaking news are those about the the MIT media "Journal Of Design and Science" who have announced to engage a radical new way to lead and legitimize research - actually already adopted by other minor journals- through a more democratic framework that is based on the "pier to pier review". This framework bypasses the traditional, anonimous and slow procedure (peer review) and opens to anyone who believes having something interesting to say. 

Is there a risk for trivialization of the problem, or are we facing the opportunity to give voice to whom has been cut off from the dialogue due to dated and obsolete system? 

This inclusive attitude in the design research (we give for granted an estabilished sustainable/human-centered design), is required and absolutely beneficial. A "antidisciplinarity" against interdisciplinarity, just to quote Jui Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, can be the right answer to involve key actors from different cultural backgrounds, who finally can show up and leave behind their sterile criticism of posthumous and useless interventions. 

Why should we exclude categories that we know having an important role in modeling our environments, such as psychologists, philosophers, artists ?

Not only "smart". For a Human-Centered City

Tessuti urbani

When you say "Smart City" the immediate idea associated is of a dense metropolis, digitized, efficient  for energy consumption and interconnected for a real-time information sharing. Moreover we think of a hierarchization where istitutions and large  private companies are at the top and the private citizen, final user,  is located at the very bottom. Without considering how much this idea is real just on the paper or not, there is to be observed that the "intelligent" model neglects what should be the main goal of spatial planning: the spiritual and social well-being, as well as intellectual, of the citizen. The agglomeration, whether urban or rural, is the expression and testimony of the culture of a place, and, as such, holds the responsibility to manage and govern a healthy social life, through the expression of ethical and spiritual values hat are expressed with signs, sounds, smells.

To get an idea of the importance that a single signal may have on our mind let's consider the 'visual' experience by itself. Let's consider any object we may encounter along a road path: as it is scannered it get a double interpretation and coding. The central vision interprets its intrinsic meaning and the peripheral vision places it in a scenic backdrop full of meanings deriving from related environments and events linked to them . Damasio (1) interprets this dual perception as an overlapping of two types of emotions: the primary emotion - of primitive nature - and the secondary one,  of upper level , with which the first forms the "feeling " that characterizes our life experiences and therefore shapes our behavior . This simple consideration made nly on the visual experience makes us understand the importance of a specific urban context can have on the characterization of a group of a people.

Montreal - Luminoterapia  (via  www.landarchs.com)

If we consider that our experience as humans is always of multisensory kind, we can realize how big is the responsibility we have when making decisions while urban planning , even if it is estimated we use on average only 10% of our time in outdoor spaces. And if it is true that complexity that pervades our cities opens to practical and numerical problems - such as the management of flows and the distribution of goods - it is also necessary use urban design strategies to improve mental and physical wellbeing, in order to induce a " positive mentalscape " ( 2 ).

SouthBank - Brisbane (via landarch.com)

The human being is the result of his interaction with the territory in which he grows and lives: with it he establishes a symbiotic relationship that constantly changes with effects in the short , medium and long term . Creating conditions that prevent the onset of stressful factors and improve our intellectual capacity is possible by exploiting the many variables that characterize the place. Paths roads easy decoding, facades of buildings that consider their expressive potential, green spaces, art installations, are all occasions to offer regenerating experiences.