Colin Ellard - You Are Here

The year behind me

It's pretty typical that I'm writing my final post of 2011 in the early days of 2012 -- that's the kind of year it was - full speed frantic activity with lots of change on both professional and personal fronts and somehow, as always seems to be the case, the two realms were intertwined.

A big piece of my professional life in 2011 was my participation in the BMW-Guggenheim Laboratory in New York City.  The Laboratory opened in August and my now fuzzy recollection was that I was invited on board in about June.  So the second half of my year was really a frenzy of nail-biting, planning, coding, and flying back and forth between mission control and the test sites we used for the experiment.  I had intended to write a series of blog posts outlining what we did for the Laboratory, but I've ended up spending so much time analyzing data (and catching up on all the stuff that got put aside when I dropped everything to take advantage of this great opportunity) that I've barely had a moment to take a breath.

So what was it all about?  I still plan to give a decent accounting of myself here at some point soon, but the short version is that I had an opportunity to design and execute an experiment in urban environmental psychology using some pretty cool mobile gear for measuring people's minds and bodies as they sauntered from place to place in New York's Lower East Side.  It was really one of my first forays out of the world of the virtual into the world of the real.  It was tough!  Collision-detection in the real world is pretty graphic and some bruising may occur.  But I think we managed to put together some tantalizing early findings -- enough for us to begin planning the next round, which I'll also eventually discuss here.

On the personal front, one of the most interesting things to happen to me was that I found myself buying and moving into a new house.  I've spent such a lot of time ruminating about how the house purchase decision takes place and how the homes we live in influence our psychology, that it's been fascinating to self-observe during that process.  As with anything, when the distance between one's data points and one's own awareness is very small -- in this case essentially zero -- any kind of objectivity is impossible.  But this doesn't mean that the process of observing is meaningless.  Indeed I've learned a lot about domestic spaces through the process of adjusting to a new and very interesting living space.  In future months I'll write about some of those adventures as well.

There's much more I could tell, but the year ahead promises to be just as busy as the year just past, and I've got to get going.

More soon.

Dissing Comfort

I've had all kinds of extra reasons to think about comfort over the past few months.  In a way, this is nothing new.  A part of my work involves understanding what comfort is, how it is measured, and especially how it is either promoted or defeated by the design of spaces and places.  In some of the experiments I've been doing in my virtual reality lab, I've been doing my best to try to figure out how the design of a domestic space -- a home, in other words -- interacts with the personality of the occupant or owner of that space to generate different kinds of feelings.  It's a fascinating question that I can only approach part of the way using my usual arsenal of scientific instruments.  Poking and probing at peoples' bodies and minds will only yield so much information I think.  In fact, it's starting to seem so complicated that there are times when I feel a little embarrassed by my approach, as if the very idea that I can get close to the deep answers I'm looking for using psychological questionnaires and little body sensors is obviously laughable.  But what I've learned so far encourages me to think that I'm on a good path -- that what we can measure will make a difference to how we design, even if we're only really getting a meager slice of the whole pie.

But now I want to get a little more personal about all of this.  I've spent this evening, like many others over the past while, wandering around in a house that I only live in part of the time now, looking for somewhere that's comfortable.  For instance, if I want to go cocoon with a book or just sit quietly with my thoughts, or write some things down, where do I go?  And the answer to that question, I've concluded tonight, is nowhere.  There is nowhere in this house that I can sit happily and feel at home.  But here's the interesting part of this discovery:  maybe that's not such a bad thing.

I had a conversation with my pilgrimage friend Nicole sometime ago.  We were on a little pilgrimage at the time (can a pilgrimage even be little?  Not so sure about that.) so the fine details of that conversation are lost to me now among the big crashing waves of self-discovery our little group experienced during our adventure.  But I do remember her mentioning a friend of hers who deliberately eschewed comfort, and that idea, of veering from shelter, became a kind of mantra for me during the pilgrimage and afterwards as well.    So the new angle here is that maybe there are times in one's life when those feelings of comfort are not really the goal.  And maybe what my body is telling me in some subtle way is that it's got nothing to do with where I sit or what vista is in front of me or how the chair I'm in is designed or who I'm with.  It's got to do with what's going on inside.  It's not time to settle.  It's time to sort myself out. It's tough.  It's....well...uncomfortable.  But it's also completely necessary.  What's happening to me now, during an epic phase of self-discovery perhaps bigger than any I've experienced before, doesn't feel as though it's being driven at all by the spaces I inhabit.  But do the spaces I live in push and prod my thinking in certain directions?  It must be so.  My other home is a small apartment where I spend about half my time.  I don't always feel comfortable there either, but it feels more like a cockpit from which I can steer my psyche with some small semblance of predictability.  When I moved there, it was important to me that nothing come through the door, not the smallest household item or piece of furniture, unless it was chosen explicitly by me.  I felt a strong desire to control all the variables, to keep things stripped down to the minimum.  It wasn't comfort I was going after there, either so much as simplicity, silence and focus.

The relationship between place and person is an evolving and complicated dance that can either promote or impede the process of self-discovery.  I've written about this stuff and I've obtained funding to study it and I've conducted the experiments and drawn all the graphs to try to account for some of the simpler aspects of this relationship.  But now I'm living the crash course.  I don't always like it.  It isn't natural to sit with discomfort.  But it is transformative.

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?

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?  

Topophobia

I'm staring into the abyss of Google maps tonight trying to plan carefully for a complicated multi-leg car journey I'm going to have to take tomorrow.  I'm zooming in and out of the map, trying to imagine how some of the different critical choices I will need to make will look from the ground.  It's something we struggle with -- the conversion from an overhead or plan view to an on-the-ground street view.  But I'm struggling with a greater problem as well, and its one that has come up a few times in recent interviews -- our primal fear of disorientation.  There's no doubt at all that there are times when this fear is completely justified.  If you're hiking the Appalachian Trail and you find yourself off the beaten path, your concern for your well-being is justified.  Similarly, if you've just landed at O'Hare Airport for the first time and you have to make your way from Gate C16 to Gate M5 in 15 minutes to make a flight, you'd better have a good pair of running shoes and a keen eye for signs.  But there are some parts of our lives where we don't have those kinds of severe constraints.  Tomorrow I have to find myself at a particular latitude and longitude at one particular point in the day (else there's going to be one p.o.'d radio producer who won't speak to me again).  After that, what I plan to do is to seek out some refreshing green vistas so that I can grab myself a few hours of restoration.  This isn't quite as easy as it sounds in a built-up area like Southern Ontario, but I'm not looking for the Adirondacks here -- a few acres of woods and, if I'm lucky, some water will do nicely.  So what I could do is just point myself west after my radio gig and follow my nose and my instincts.  Instead what I'm doing is scrutinizing aerial maps for likely looking clumps of vegetation and water. Maybe I'm an outlier, but I think that as we have more and more aids to navigation, more and more of us are finding it a little difficult to let go of that primal fear of being lost.  Maybe that's what's going on here.  For thousands of years our DNA has grown up with these protective mechanisms that equate disorientation with death, so it seems unavoidable that we have this little frisson of fear when we realize we don't know exactly where we are.  And technology feeds that need.  I argue all the time for the adoption of a more playful relationship with space.  I want people to just let themselves be led by those deep hidden impulses whenever they can be, because I think that's the way we can all begin to understand not only how spaces affect how we think and feel, but what kinds of spaces we actually want in our built world.  What feels good?  What works?  Yet her I am sitting up a bit past my bedtime plotting routes and worrying about where I'll be and when I'll be there.  I think what I'd like to have is a GPS with a sense of humour.  "Oh, did I say left back there?" she'd chuckle with a wry little silicon smirk on her smooth face.  "Oops.  Sorry.  I'll try to get it right next time.  I just get so distracted with all these satellites chattering at me, ya know? Why don't we just roll down the window and breath together."  I need a subversive machine to derail my obsessive need to be here right now.  I'm sure it'll all be just fine.  And if none of you ever hear from me again, just imagine me wandering off into a lovely green vista somewhere west of Toronto.  It'll all work out.

Gender differences in spatial navigation

I've noticed that there have been some commentaries (and I've received a few emails recently) connected with some of my statements about gender differences in spatial navigation.  It can be incredibly hard to convey what I think is a subtle and nuanced story in a brief sound bite for media, and the fact that there's room for some misconstrual of my meaning is really nobody's fault.  It's how all of this works.  But here on my blog I have the leisure of laying things out a little and trying to convey the bigger picture as I see it.

I should probably begin by saying that the work I do in my laboratory never focuses on gender differences in the navigation tasks that we use.  Yet my students and I know the literature well enough to know that when we look for differences, we are likely to find some.  We have many discussions at our lab meetings about this.  Sometimes we decide to downplay the differences as much as possible because they are not the focus of our study.  At other times though, we (and often that 'we' is just 'me') argue that these differences are an important component of the variability in human behaviour that we want to describe, and so we should muster the bravery to wade in and to try to understand what's going on.  When we do compare the genders, the differences that we identify are often nothing like those that might be predicted on a simple-minded dichotomy of gender a=good and gender b=not so good.  In fact, the differences often come out in complicated higher-order interactions between our variables (and I'll admit freely that we most often find these interactions very difficult or impossible to explain and, because they are not the prime focus of our research, we don't often pursue them in any kind of determined way).  So that's me and how gender influences my own work in spatial navigation.  What about the rest of the field?

Here's the canonical view of the field as I understand it.  In simulations of real world tasks using either laboratory situations, or virtual reality, or sometimes even in field studies of human beings doing real world tasks, a difference that often seems to arise is that women appear to rely more on a strategy based on keen observation of landmarks and men appear to rely more on a strategy based on an understanding of Euclidean geometry.  This distinction has been observed repeatedly and it also has an interesting analog in non-humans.  Even laboratory rats show some signs of a similar difference in spatial strategies between the sexes.  As with all aspects of human behavior, there are some modifiers that we need to attach to this basic finding.  The main one is that there is a tremendous amount of variability in performance on these behavioral tasks and that there is a great deal of overlap between the genders in the distribution of that variability.  What this means is that it isn't too hard to find men who do better with landmarks than geometry, nor is it hard to find women who do better with geometry than with landmarks -- I hear from such individuals all the time and I see them in some of my studies.  However, the averages suggest a difference between the genders, and a pretty good sized one at that.

I find this difference fascinating.  I don't understand entirely what it means.  Most accounts try to put together some kind of arm-waving argument that the differences are related to differences in lifestyle of our ancient forebears.  Put simply, males were more likely to explore larger ranges while females were more likely to stay closer to home territory but to know that territory and both what it had to offer and the risks it engendered in fine detail.  Males had an eye for distance and females for detail.  I can see the logic of the argument but it's one of those things that is very hard to bring from the realm of amusing speculation to hard science.  

The implications for modern human wayfinding are very interesting as well.  I think one of the main implications of such strategic differences, whether they're gender based or not, is that the two strategies that I've described -- landmark-based or Euclidean, are more or less likely to work well in different kinds of situations.  In a grid city like Manhattan, Toronto, Calgary, or countless others, a strategy based on Euclidean geometry might work well, but so might a landmark based strategy.  In a city with a more tortuous and winding street pattern with lots of irregular intersections, a Euclidean strategy will not work as well because it will be more prone to error, but landmark navigation could work very well indeed.  Think of trying to find your way in Venice by keeping track of where North was.  You might be able to do it, but I think it would take a tremendous focus of attention to pull it off.

For those who might like to delve deeper, here are some references.

Calling expert wayfinders

I really enjoyed my stint on CBC's Ontario Today yesterday.  I have to confess I was a little taken aback when I realized that EVERYONE other than me was in Ottawa and I had this big comfy recording studio in Toronto to myself, but when the sound engineer explained that this meant I could pretty much do whatever I wanted -- kick back, put my feet up, dance around the room, I quickly recognized the possibilities (but then became so engrossed in the conversation that I soon forgot to take advantage of the solitude.  I don't think I even made any funny faces.  Opportunity lost....).

What I found most fun about the callers' stories was that we heard overwhelmingly from expert wayfinders.  With this kind of thing, one expects to hear from the tails of the distribution, so in a way this was not surprising.  I could also understand the reluctance of listeners from the other tail to chime in as readily.  Who wants to call in and say "I can't find my way out of paper bag", though one stalwart listener called in to tell me pretty much that and I'm grateful for him for carrying the mantle of the lost generation yesterday.

But on the drive home (yes, the eco-nut DROVE as this was the only way to both do a decent job of the interview AND attend my daughter's graduation ceremonies in the evening.  There really isn't a proper commuter train system in Southern Ontario -- the most heavily populated region in the country) I thought quite a lot about the comments of the callers.  It was certainly true that one common strand among the experts was that they felt that they paid close attention to their surroundings and maintained some level of awareness of their place at all times, but there were also listeners who told me that they never ever ever got lost and they didn't really know why that had this special ability.  They just always knew where North was, or home was, or the water was, or where SOMETHING was.  This fascinates me.

I'm thinking of starting a little research project on sense of direction in expert navigators.  I'm not quite ready to set things up in a formal way yet, but if you think you qualify as an expert, if you're one of those lucky people who never get lost whether in the woods, in the confusing labyrinth of Venice, or in the most byzantine corridors of a confusing government complex, I'd like to hear from you.

I've got a big box of books to give away and I'll let one or two fly away in exchange for a little Canadian wayfinding savvy.

Another radio interview coming up soon for the NPR network.  I suspect I'll be by myself for this one as well.  I'll be pulling faces this time.  And maybe I'll have my feet up on the table too.  If you listen in and hear a giant crash, that'll be me tipped over on the floor.  Details closer to the date.

Chimpanzee spatial memory

This really interesting article suggests that forest chimpanzees are capable of prodigious feats of spatial memory in which they remember the exact locations of thousands of trees, and factor into their searches for them how their fruit abundance varies from month to month. I'm impressed by the methods -- the authors needed to follow individual apes for days at a time in a forest in Cote d'Ivoire, notebook and GPS in hand, and they also had to map the locations of tens of thousands of trees.  To test the memory capabilities of the chimps,they compared their observations of real animals to a number of simulations of 'virtual apes' that were carried out using a variety of different kinds of assumptions -- the baseline assumption being that chimpanzees just walk straight until they bump into a tree and then bounce off of it and move in another more or less random direction.  The chimp movements were far from random -- they showed nicely directed search patterns zeroing in on rare trees with abundant fruit.  I once spent a year doing field work in the wilds of Australia, so I have deep respect and awe for anyone who can wander into a thick forest for a year and wander back out again with a nice set of data.  Things don't always go so well.  In my own case, I came out of the field with a set of legs scarred up by gigantic burrowing tics, a deep fear of the Taipan, one of the world's deadliest snakes, and a basic understanding of how not to be eaten by a crocodile--always go into the bush with someone who can't run as fast as you can--which explains why I was such a popular bush-date that year...  But I digress.

What these wild chimpanzees are able to do is obviously a far cry from the abilities of the average urban human being, who not only is unlikely to be able to go back into the forest to find the same tree he found yesterday, but is also somewhat likely to die of exposure before finding his way back to his starting point.  I describe such differences in a fair bit of detail in my book.  But one of the things that interests me a lot about these findings is their contrast with the handful of studies conducted on spatial memory in captive primates who often show a tendency to get lost, especially when they're unleashed on anything like a natural setting.  A question that I've been asked a lot lately is whether I think the human spatial clumsiness results from an unavoidable missing chip of some kind -- that we're just missing a tool that other animals possess -- or whether our spatial skills have just languished through lack of use.  The ape comparison here suggests the latter.  So what would a human being, completely comfortable and at home in natural situations, look like?  How well would they stand up in the kinds of foraging tasks that these forest chimpanzees were challenged with?  Also, given the argument in the BBC writeup of these findings, and the suggestion that the extraordinary spatial memory of the wild chimpanzee can be thought of as a kind of signpost to advanced primate cognition, what do we make of the fact that modern human beings of the urban kind are generally as spatially slow-witted as a caged tamarin?

One final little sidenote.  The authors of the study found some interesting gender differences which did NOT support the standard story that Men are from Mars and Women don't know WHERE they're from -- just as I've been saying in talks and interviews -- there are gender differences but they're much more subtle and interesting than this standard tale.  In the chimpanzee study, females were generally more efficient and spatially savvy searchers.  

I'll be watching for updates from this really interesting group, though what they're doing is tough.  The going will be slow.

Getting lost in the woods

Ok, it's true.  I did get a little lost in the woods with Colin Hunter of The Record.  But in my defense, it was quite purposeful and it was only for a few seconds.  We were talking about cultivating a playful relationship with space.  Something I find interesting is that we have a deep primal fear of being lost, especially in wilderness.  Our little adventure last week was not exactly wilderness trekking.  We were in a suburban forest not much bigger than a Walmart, but it has lots of undulating criss-crossing trails, some dense wood, and some really nice changes in elevation.  If you become distracted, you can get nicely disoriented.  And I emphasize nicely.  The idea we were discussing was that it might be fun and possibly even useful for people to make themselves more attuned to the size and shape of physical space by deliberately taking themselves into unfamiliar terrain for a little while, purposefully losing their bearings and then doing a little self-monitoring.  In simple adventures like this one, we know we're not going to die of exposure or be mauled by bears.  Worst case is that we spend a little more time than we expected to in leisurely pursuits, and we end up finding things we weren't expecting to.  Not such a terrible fate, and very good for our minds.

The biology of public space

Whenever I'm lucky enough to have a chance to bend the ear of an architect about my crazy ideas, I come away with new enthusiasm for how much untapped potential there is to connect architecture and psychology, and new humility about how much I just don't know.  I've written a couple of posts about my slow and painful education in Le Corbusian architectural theory -- a work still very much in progress -- and I had another small lesson when I had lunch with a sharp, young architect named Vincent Hui on Friday.  I say 'lunch', though somehow things got a bit out of hand.  After planning about three years of research we discovered that much of the afternoon had vanished behind us.  Time well spent.

I couldn't possibly summarize all of the ideas Vincent set in motion, but one that interested me a lot had to do with understanding how public space works.  I'm here slogging into an area of huge interest and attention, of course.  There is a long history of academic and practical interest in how such spaces work (or don't).  One thinks first of people like William Whyte, Jan Gehl, and Jane Jacobs, perhaps.  As I've mentioned before, my own bias about Le Corb, and I know I'm not alone, is that he got things really wrong.  If you throw buildings up on pillars to create big wide open spaces underneath them, people hate them.  When I said something like this at our lunch, Vincent leaned forward in his chair, fixed me with a look of some urgency and suggested that this was not always true.  Cryptically, he promised pictures.  Here's one now:

 This is an HSBC bank in Hong Kong.  You can see enough to understand that it's an open space underneath a building, in a manner befitting LeCorb, but it is also obviously working as a public space.  Not only public, but exuding such comfort as a refuge that occupants are not only sitting on beautiful little blankets to enjoy picnics and conversations, but they're actually snuggling up and falling asleep.  This is nothing like the Pruitt-Igoe-high-crime-crack-pipe-shards-of-broken-glass images that we normally conjure up when we think of the failure of Radiant City.

So why does this happen here and not, for example, here?

Or here?

Well, where do we begin?  Density?  Maybe.  The Foster Bank in Hong Kong is in one of the most densely populated areas of the world.  Pruitt-Igoe was never even fully occupied in its heyday.

But there's much more to it than that.  We all know about public spaces that work and ones that don't.  Think of where you live.  Think of a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon in the core of your city.  What places are empty and which ones are teeming with people?  Much, you might argue, would have to do with what's around you.  But underneath a bank on Hong Kong?  What's there?  

What about biology?  In psychology, there's a classic old test called the "open field test".  It's hard to imagine anything simpler.  Plonk an animal into an open space of some kind and see what it does.  The first thing you'll discover is that any self-respecting animal has strong and quickly developing place preferences.  Other than some very simple things, though, such as that many animals prefer dark places and places where they are close to a wall, we know very little about how such preferences develop.  We assume (and make the argument sometimes) that these kinds of preferences must relate to survival.  Animals probably prefer the spaces that are most likely to be safe from predators, aggressive neighbours, the environment.  

When Filipino domestics in Hong Kong go out for an urban Sunday picnic, they're probably not worrying about predators or typhoons, but they're still led to make choices about where to spread those colourful blankets by deeply in-built impulses that propel them towards comfort.  So one of the differences between public spaces that work and those that fail seems likely to me to have to do with preferences for size, shape and appearances of spaces.  Understanding how to tap into those preferences to build successful public spaces might be helped along by adopting a more biological approach to how we apprehend spaces, and then doing the experiments to establish the general principles.  Time to get busy.