Architect James Polk wrote a wonderful column recently, encouraging his readers to tune in to the emotional impact of their lived spaces. When you're walking through a neighbourhood or a building, how does it make you feel? What do you like and what don't you like? What makes you anxious? There's much fascinating material to mine here, and the best way to do it is to lace up sneakers and take to the streets. Over the coming months, I'm hoping to do quite a lot of this myself, both in my local haunts and farther afield as I take advantage of some nice travel opportunities.
But back to James....
He says
You don’t need a Ph.D. for this little experiment. We all, as humans, have the innate ability to intuitively feel the world around us.This applies to the world we build as well as our natural surroundings.Well, uh, yeah James I tend to agree, but the problem is that I have a PhD and I can't turn the damned thing off. I want to do experiments. In followup conversation (On FACEBOOK! YES! It was actually useful!) we talked a little bit about how one might go about designing some studies to try to understand in more detail how these kinds of emotional effects of the built world come about. I can see the skeptical point of view that it's just too complicated to approach with simple one-factor experiments (more cowbell=more happiness) but the scientist in me won't sit still. I think there are all kinds of great tools that could be used to probe these kinds of effects, and they could be very useful for designers.
The most surprising thing for me was to learn that the training of architects includes little instruction on how buildings make us feel. Is that because we know what works but we don't know how to explain it?
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