Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Bruce Trail

I really enjoyed talking to the group from the Bruce Trail Conservancy last week in Toronto.  They were such an attentive and interested audience and they had very perceptive questions.  I could have stayed all night talking to them.  I couldn't imagine a better group to appreciate some of my lab's findings related to the restorative effects of exposure to nature.  We have one nice article out already, and another one just sent off to reviewers.  The short version of our story so far is that we can make people feel really good by placing them in simulations of natural settings, which means that we have a tool to help us figure out why exposure to nature is so good for us psychologically.  It's certainly one of the most interesting things going on in my lab these days, but I wish we could start moving in the direction of combining my architectural interests with this work.  It would be great to leverage our findings to contribute to biophilic design in buildings and cities. I'm impatient for these findings to have a greater impact.

The organization sent me home with a Bruce Trail Reference Guide, and this has re-kindled an interest that I've had for quite some time in exploring both this trail and perhaps the Appalachian Trail as well.  I'm starting to feel a little strange that I'm giving lots of talks telling people how important it is for them to get themselves into the wild, yet I'm not spending enough time in wild places myself.

First remembered home

The first home I remember living in is the one pictured below, at the approximate location of the marker.  I lived in this house from the age of about 1 until age 7, at which point my family pulled up stakes and moved to Canada.  I have some memories of this house but, as mentioned in the last post, I'm slowly pulling some new ones out of the deep troughs of my ancient past.  When I think about this house, the first thing I always remember is a somewhat strange and often repeated dream.  In the dream, I would slowly float down the staircase, which faced the front door. Near the bottom of the stairs, I would stop and slowly rotate to the left, where I would scrutinize the pattern on the wallpaper, which was a kind of fine fleur-de-lis pattern.  I'd always have a slight chill at this point, a little bit of anxiety about what was behind that wall (which in truth was nothing more than a dark and empty living room (there was no cellar in the house, but there was a coal bunker -- did the dark and unoccupied midnight living room stand in for Bachelard's cellar?  Maybe.).  Then I'd float the rest of the way down the stairs, past the front room and then onward to my parents' bedroom which was located just behind the front room.  After each episode of the dream, I would awaken in my parents' bed, so clearly there was some sleepwalking involved.  It interests me a lot that this passage from my bed to my parents' bed is so deeply etched for me, but other elements of the story remind me of what others have been saying here.  I was preoccupied with the pattern on the wallpaper (I wonder if all parents know how important wall coverings are to kids -- why is that?  I have some ideas for later).  In a way, I did see the route from bed to bed as a series of snapshots, but I had some sense of the motion between the views.  But although I felt the motion in my dream, I was floating passively, not under my own control.  There's more that I remember from this early house, and more memories still will emerge once I've had more of a chance to debrief my siblings, but I'll have to reflect much more on how, if at all, the shape of this home influenced my later preferences and my feelings.

 

First home

Well, I've managed to light a tiny fire in my family as we begin to think about our first homes.  I always think of my first home as a house in Walthamstow, which is the first house that I have any recollections of (more in another post), but after careful interrogation of my older brother, who has had the role of paterfamilias thrust upon him now that our parents are gone, I've tracked down my real first home.  Here's a satellite shot of the neighbourhood in England with the "A" marker being at the approximate location of my birth home:

The actual house looks to be a row house or a semi-detached house perhaps, but I've no idea if this is the same house that was there at the time (why do I suddenly feel like Leopold Bloom?  I do really exist, don't I?).  I was only there for the first year of my life, so I have no real recollections of it.  Yet I'm fascinated by the thought that going back into that house might have some effect on me, might dredge up some ancient neural circuitry.  I wonder if it would be possible?

I had a wonderful conversation with my other brother about the next house along in our family history, the first one that I remember, and the fascinating thing is that I thought I had pretty much put together all of my memories of that house into one tiny package and as soon as brother started to spill the stories, I remembered more of the spaces and more of the feelings associated with them.  It was an eerie sensation to have him re-spark my childhood anxieties about a dark, empty ground floor room that I had forgotten existed.   

Getting back to nature

This is going to be fun.  I never seem to run out of stories of getting lost--I think it's really the defining arc of my life.  Recently, I've had this crazy urge to walk the Appalachian Trail.  The Bruce Trail seems like a more natural starting point, so I'm hoping to learn a little more about it from the group.  And I bet I'll meet some kick-ass wayfinders as well.

The poetics of space

Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space was published in 1958 as an attempt to describe "lived space" rather than conceptual space.  Over the past few days, the book seems to have come up in conversation surprisingly often.  Ok.  That's mostly because I keep bringing it up.  I've hauled my copy of the book home to my little perch in the sky tonight, and I'm going to start reading.  Anyone interested in reading along with me?  Here's a teaser quote:

"Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality."

Domestic spaces and emotion

One of my very favourite things to do is call-in radio.  You never know what fantastic nuggets of wisdom or interesting problems people will come up with.  I had a wonderful session on Ontario Today yesterday, on the theme of interior design and emotion -- "what bugs you about your house?"  It's a stretch for me to pose as an interior designer, but it's very definitely true that there are some interesting connections between the work I do in my lab and the problems people face in selecting, designing, and organizing their homes.

The most interesting call came from a man who had bought his first house, only to discover sometime afterward how much it resembled the house where he grew up, which was not a happy time for him.  He was discovering that the form of the house was raising some ghosts for him.  This utterly fascinates me.  First, that he made this purchase perhaps without understanding all of the reasons that it attracted him, and secondly because of the suggestion that the appearances of domestic spaces and how we use them might provoke emotions based on our personal histories.  I always tend to think of the effect of space on the mind in terms of deep biological universals.  But there's a lot more to it than that.

After the show, the most interesting email I received came from someone who had just purchased a loft.  She wanted to know what I thought of the boxy, cavernous spaces in lofts and how they might work on our minds.  I hadn't thought about this much before, but I am now.  These structures are incredibly popular, and not all of it has to do with their appearance, but I think some does.  Many people (myself included) are attracted to high ceilings.  Why?  And is living under one as appealing as that first look at one when shopping for a home?

Narrative immersion

I had a very nice visit with a group of young high school students this morning who are part of a program called Waterloo Unlimited.  This is the second chance I've had to speak to students in this program, and on both occasions I've been blown away by the caliber of the questions from the students.  For this morning's talk, I re-purposed a talk that I had given to a university crowd, and I deliberated for a while over whether the content of the presentation might have been pitched a bit high for a high school audience.  Given the very insightful questions asked by the students, my worries were unfounded.  Indeed, I could have jacked up the content of the talk a few more notches and they would have probably enjoyed the stimulation.  The students really seemed to resonate to the idea that exposure to natural settings causes big changes in our behaviour, our mood, our feelings, but they also leapt without prompting to the implications of these ideas for the design of video games.  

I had some interesting conversations with the leaders of the program after the formal presentation was over, including the suggestion by Rae Crossman a poet/educator/wilderness wanderer/very cool guy that it might be interesting to look at the effects of narrative itself on bodily states.  If we can be transported to wilderness by convincing visuals of rainforests and beaches, then perhaps Wordsworth's finely crafted descriptions of pastoral scenes, for example, might also transport us and produce positive affect and improved health.

At the very end of proceedings, I had a final conversation with a wonderful young man who asked me whether, given the known power of exposure to nature to effect improvements in mood and health, why it was that doctors didn't actually prescribe such things.  It's a great question.  When we think about health and our homes, we usually leap to ideas about air quality, the presence of toxic substances in household goods, and the like.  Rather than thinking about the molecules that are bouncing around in our homes, what if we thought more about their vistas and views?

Feeling spaces

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?