Open Invitation to Urban Experience and Design Book Launch: Friday, January 15, 2021, 3PM EST

Posted on January 7, 2021 by Genetics of Design

The Human Architecture and Planning Institute, Tufts UEP, and Routledge invite you to a global, virtual event to celebrate the publication of the new book Urban Experience and Design: Contemporary Perspectives on Improving the Public Realm on January 15, 2021, 3PM-4PM Eastern Time.

Editors Justin Hollander and Ann Sussman will be on hand, offering remarks on the book’s origins from the Tufts 2019 Ux+Design conference, and then introducing many of the book chapter contributors. Each author will then speak briefly about their chapter followed by a Q&A and book discussion. All are invited to attend the informative Webex session. To receive the free link, just send an email requesting it, to: artscapeshow@gmail.com.

Urban Experience and Design: Contemporary Perspectives on Improving the Public Realm embraces a biological and evolutionary perspective to explain how buildings impact us. The book explores how cognitive science and biometric tools provide an evidence-based foundation for architecture and planning. Aiming to promote the creation of a healthier and happier public realm, it describes how unconscious responses to stimuli, outside our conscious awareness, direct our experience of the built environment and govern human behavior in our surroundings.

Researchers in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, France and Iran contributed to its 15 chapters. Topics addressed range from using eye-tracking to better understand the architectural experience to the importance of seeing beauty and finding empathy in design, to how new understandings in neuroscience, specifically concerning brain trauma, rewrite the narrative of how modern architecture came to be.　

The volume invites students, architects and the public at large to see how cognitive science and biometric findings give us new 21st-century metrics for evaluating and improving designs in the built environment before they are built.

Routledge will provide a discount code for the book for event attendees. More information here: https://www.routledge.com/Urban-Experience-and-Design-Contemporary-Perspectives-on-Improving-the/Hollander-Sussman/p/book/9780367435554

Posted in Architecture, Biology, City Planning, Design | Tagged | 3 Comments

Embracing Nature on a Rail Trail

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Genetics of Design

How does this picture make you feel: Scared? Happy? Or in awe of nature’s ability to co-exist with humans?

We often disrupt Nature, and she, in her wordless way, adapts. Here, a tree wraps around a concrete marker along an old rail line, almost upending it, showing how out of place it really is in her forest.

And here, she directs the bark to devour an old metal sign along the same route, effectively swallowing it, making it finally disappear! Nature doesn’t need boundary markers, when after all, everything is connected. Everything counts.

Even at the end of a lifecycle, as the fallen tree below shows, Nature provides fertile ground for a carpet of green moss to root and flourish, sustaining robust growth of flora + fauna on the forest floor.

We have so much to learn from Nature! All we have to do is look. (She leaves no trash; she reuses and recycles everything.)  Given the current state of the world, it really does seem it’s time to appreciate, embrace and adapt to Nature’s systems too.

The top two photos here are from the Reformatory Branch Trail, in Concord, MA USA; the bottom one, also in Concord, is along the Old Rifle Range. Stop by some time; both are free, open to the public and have much to teach.

Posted in Nature, Patterns, Walkability | Leave a comment

‘Built Beautiful,’ the Movie on Architecture + Neuroscience Streaming Live at Boston Architectural College on Dec. 7, 2020

Posted on December 2, 2020 by Genetics of Design

Built Beautiful – Trailer from Mariel Rodriguez-McGill on Vimeo.

The Boston Architectural College (BAC) announced it will screen this new documentary which bridges the arts + sciences on Monday, December 7, 2020 at 7 PM EST. All are invited to attend the virtual event: SIGN UP HERE for free.

Built Beautiful is a feature length documentary movie, to be nationally released in spring 2021, which explores how neuroscience gives architects a new lens through which to consider the built environment, how it impacts our brains and bodies, and how it influences our health and wellness more than we realize. At this exclusive screening the film director, Mariel Rodriguez-McGill, and producer Don Ruggles, will be on hand to introduce the film along with BAC faculty member and blogger, Ann Sussman, who appears in it.

The movie features leading experts from around the world in the emerging field of neuro-aesthetics and design, including academics, researchers, architects, and interior designers, elaborating on ideas presented at the Ux+Design/2019 conference (co-sponsored by Genetics of Design) held at Tufts University and in Ruggles’ 2018 book Beauty, Neuroscience & Architecture .

Co-sponsored by the Human Architecture and Planning Institute (theHAPI.org) and the BAC’s Design for Human Health program, the event is free.

More info on this BAC program + movie registration at link below:

https://the-bac.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_AvG_RyMASk6vjd47FCOOTg

Hope to ‘see’ you there!

Posted in Architecture, Biology, Design, Neuroscience, People-centric Design | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

To Keep Calm: Take in Nature + Fall Fractals

Posted on November 18, 2020 by Genetics of Design

Nature walks relieve stress, curb anxiety, and help us feel calm. That’s what we found on a recent walk through the woods in Concord, Massachusetts, and now there’s more science to back it up.

Pinecones

Outside in nature, we easily take in patterns called fractals. What makes fractal patterns unique is that they repeat at varying scales. Fractals are in pine cones, like the ones above, the bark of a tree and the veins of a leaf—any form where the same shape recurs in different sizes.  In fall foliage,  fractals abound—from spiral repeats in the pine cones to ever-changing branching patterns in trees. And that turns out to be truly important, a recent article in Psychology Today explains: Studies show that “exposure to fractal patterns in nature reduce people’s levels of stress up to 60%.”

pines

And there’s more, according to Science Daily: “Just 20 minutes of contact with nature will lower stress hormone levels. [This] study has established for the first time the most effective dose of an urban nature experience. Healthcare practitioners can use this discovery to prescribe ‘nature-pills’ in the knowledge that they have a real measurable effect.”

Thistle on Conservation Land

And, why do fractals soothe? An article in the Atlantic explains:

“Your visual system is in some way hardwired to understand fractals. The stress-reduction is triggered by a physiological resonance that occurs when the fractal structure of the eye matches that of the fractal image being viewed. If a scene is too complicated, like a city intersection, we can’t easily take it all in, and that in turn leads to some discomfort, even if subconsciously. It makes sense that our visual cortex would feel most at home among the most common natural features we evolved alongside. So perhaps part of our comfort in nature derives from fluent visual processing.”

In other words, fractals fit what we are built to see.

We evolved with them and they are also in us: our eyes, brain and veins all follow fractal arrangements. So take a break, and as time allows, take this prescription: a 20-minute Nature Walk with Fall Fractals.

It will help you, ‘Keep Calm + Carry On,’ as that old British slogan goes. And what could be more important for everyone in our times. 🙂

leaves

Posted in Fractals, Nature, Patterns, Primal Vista, Walkability | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Participate in a Biometric Study in Boston – November 5, 2020!

Posted on October 19, 2020 by Genetics of Design

Participate in this important study promoting the research we do at geneticsofdesign.com working with the non-profit theHapi.org; it’s a great chance to try out eye-tracking glasses and really see what your body’s doing subliminally as you walk down a street! Contact Vernon above for more info and to sign up. We still have a few spots left – and this week the weather’s supposed to be good!

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Eye Tracking Architecture to ‘See’ Human Nature

Posted on October 13, 2020 by Genetics of Design

Humans are remarkable creatures, and a great way to appreciate the hidden aspects of our nature is with eye tracking, a biometric tool that measures how our eyes move to take in our surroundings—often without our conscious awareness or control. Eye tracking records what people look at and what they ignore. It’s really an amazing tool to help us understand human behavior and ultimately, better ‘see’ ourselves.

Eye tracking a blank wall in Somerville, Massachusetts with iMotions biometric software shows how viewer behavior shifts dramatically if graced with art. original photo: Dan Bartman

The images above, from our research, show the exit area outside the Davis Square subway station in Somerville, Massachusetts, as it exists today (at bottom) and how it might look with added art (images at top). Eye tracking—aggregating visual data to create ‘heat maps’—glows brightest and reddest where people look most. Here the heat maps show that people barely look at the wall exiting the subway, in a brief, 15-second testing interval, but with the added art they would behave much differently. They would likely approach or even linger in front of the art-filled wall and, significantly, perhaps even focus on the area long enough to create a memory of the moment.

Eye tracking reveals how people look at a library facade differently with windows; study with iMotions biometric software, with Justin Hollander at Tufts, for the City of New York

Eye tracking is fantastic at deconstructing how our experience of architecture happens without our awareness, depending on what’s in front of us. In the images above, for instance, we found people implicitly look at this library differently if it has windows. With windows, the eyes take in the façade fairly evenly; without windows (we Photoshopped them away) people ignore most of the building except its door. In these images, the yellow dots, represent fixations, spots where the eyes focus, and the lines between, saccades, tracking the movements between focal points. When asked where they’d rather wait,  people always respond in front of the building with windows, and they won’t know why. (But we have an idea; the added fixations the windows provide subliminally make people feel more secure in front of the fenestrated façade.)

How unconscious behaviors direct our experience of the built environment is a theme of the new book, Urban Experience and Design; Contemporary Perspectives on Improving the Public Realm just out this month. Its introductory chapter, featuring the images and research reported here, is followed by 14 original chapters by twenty researchers and academics from the US, Europe and the Middle East. The seminal idea: we can build better places for people worldwide by better understanding the remarkable ways we work. And today’s tech tools, including eye tracking, helping us ‘see’ our animal nature as never before, give us an unprecedented opportunity to use biometrics to improve the public realm.

You can read the first chapter of the new book here; more about revealing research reported in succeeding chapters to follow in future posts.

https://www.routledge.com/Urban-Experience-and-Design-Contemporary-Perspectives-on-Improving-the/Hollander-Sussman/p/book/9780367435554

More on History of Eye Tracking:

A Brief History of Eye-Tracking
Posted in Architecture, Design, Eye Tracking, Neuroscience, People-centric Design | 1 Comment

How Neuroscience Reframes Architectural History (on YouTube)

Posted on September 23, 2020 by Genetics of Design

Story + video by Ann Sussman, RA

This video was posted last week at the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA) 2020 conference:

It reviews a poster, first presented at the 30th Annual International Trauma Conference in Boston, MA in 2019, which combines new understanding of how trauma changes the brain, altering perception, with new understandings of how normal or neurotypical perception works, making a viewer unconsciously prioritize taking in faces and areas of complexity and contrast. It seeks to answer an abiding question: why does modern architecture, post-WWI, look and feel so differently than traditional? Why is it so often blank and detail-free?

Certainly, an urge to bury the past, after WWI (1914-1918) with the horrors of industrialized warfare and loss of 20 million people, encouraged a new design approach, as did new technologies enabling the expansive use of glass, steel, and concrete, and accompanying economic incentives. 

But the missing link in the story we tell of how modern architecture came to be, is how trauma changes the brain, distorts a survivor’s perception of ‘reality’, and can manifest itself in every design move a survivor makes decades later without their awareness or conscious control. We can now explain a key reason why ‘modern’ architecture looked so different from that of the past – it represents a direct expression of the horror of the trench warfare that preceded it.

An effective way of ‘seeing’ this is by looking at the house built by a ‘founding modernist’, none other than Walter Gropius, (1883-1969), himself, the founder of the Bauhaus. On a rural road, twenty miles west of Boston in Lincoln, MA, the iconic ‘modern’ building looks little like the traditional New England houses in the area with their pitched roofs and shutters. Built twenty years after the Great War, in 1938, Gropius’ home has a flat root, slit windows and hidden front door. Undeniably, it was unique for its time, but reviewing its design today, psychologists describe it as actually firmly rooted in the past – Gropius’ own horrific one as a German soldier on the ghastly Western Front. We learn here how the neuroscience of trauma and how it changes the brain also reframes the history of modern architecture and helps us better understand what humans need to see to be at their best.

More information about how neuroscience informs our understanding of architecture and reframes its history, is elaborated in two new books, Urban Experience + Design, Contemporary Perspectives on Improving the Public Realm (Routledge, 2021) and in the 2nd edition of Cognitive Architecture (Routledge, 2021) which came out in July. We’ll have more to say about this latter book and its eye-tracking research, which references our work at geneticsofdesign.com, in coming posts.

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Thanks to ArchNewsNow.com for featuring this video, October 7, 2020:

http://www.archnewsnow.com/news/TodaysNews.htm

+ ArchDaily.com for printing related articles in September, 2020:

● https://www.archdaily.com/947890/what-neuroscience-says-about-modern-architecture-approach

+ in Portuguese, thanks to ArchDaily.com for providing this translation:

● https://www.archdaily.com.br/br/948009/o-que-a-neurociencia-diz-sobre-a-arquitetura-moderna

Posted in Architecture, Neuroscience | 1 Comment

Faces: The Key to Making Happy Places

Posted on September 8, 2020 by Genetics of Design

Screen Shot 2020-09-01 at 7.17.49 PMDo you see faces in these gingerbread cottages in Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard, a popular summer retreat on this island ten miles off the coast of Massachusetts? Does it seem like they are looking at you? Built as part of a Methodist campground in the 1860s, the houses replaced the pitched tents early congregants first set up. Today over 300 of them remain on the Campground site which was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2005.Screen Shot 2020-09-01 at 7.18.11 PMAnd who wouldn’t find them captivating? “The homes may be some of the most photographed in the entire country,” a 2016 article in Country Living reports. “Is there a more charming neighborhood in all of New England?” asks a recent post in New England Today. And of course, the cottages grab your eye, we’re a social species, hardwired to take in anything and everything that is face-like.

Pareidolia, the term for the very human phenomenon of seeing faces in everyday objects, is at work here. This visual illusion is an artifact of our evolution and secures our survival, explains a recent article in MedicalXpress. “We process these “fake” faces using the same visual mechanisms of the brain that we do for real ones,” it notes. “Our brain has evolved to facilitate social interaction, and this shapes the way that we see the world around us.”

So, no surprise, that the gingerbread houses have been a favorite of Vineyard visitors for years; our brain sees them as waiting to see us! As the pareidolia researcher Dr. Colin Palmer says: “We know that the object doesn’t really have a mind, but we can’t help but see it as having mental characteristics like a ‘direction of gaze’ because of mechanisms in our visual system that become active when they detect an object with basic face-like features.”

Sensing face-like cottage facades makes us feel at home in a space, keeps us coming back and makes the visits memorable.  In the Vineyard, there’s another good place to appreciate the power of pareidolia, moving beyond architecture; it’s at Toad Rock, a historic site on Native American, Wampanoag, tribal land, in Acquinnah, twenty miles to the west.

Toad Rock

Here’s a place people have visited for thousands of years, and once there, you get why; it provides that one design element people most need to see to secure themselves in a space: a face.

The upshot? To make memorable places where people want to be, build in faces. Mother Nature, after all, has preset what we most need to see and we all pay a price, always, when we ignore her intent!

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More posts on our face-bias here:

Posted in Architecture, Biology, Design, Neuroscience, People-centric Design | Tagged , | 5 Comments

The Case Against All-Glass Facades

Posted on July 18, 2020 by Genetics of Design

Screen Shot 2020-07-12 at 2.26.18 PM

original images©Becky Chen

The pictures tell the story. And make the case. Biometric studies explain why. At left, is a photo of MassArt Design and Media Center, (c. 2016), a public college of applied art in downtown Boston; at right, the George Wythe House (c.1754), a historic site in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. Which building most readily grabs your eye?

Where do you think people will look ?

It you guessed the building at right, the Georgian brick one and not the all-glass facade, you’re right! Biometric studies, using software which predicts how people view a scene initially, in the first 3-to-5 seconds, before conscious viewing comes online, show why.

Screen Shot 2020-07-13 at 10.44.28 AM

The VAS (Visual Attention Software) study creates region of interest (ROI) diagrams which reveal where viewers’ gaze likely goes, and indicate with red outlines that 75 to 82 percent of them take in the sky and areas around the glassy college building, rather than the structure itself! This is precisely opposite what happens with the old brick building, where 98 percent of views fall directly on the front facade and adjacent fence!

Screen Shot 2020-07-12 at 8.17.23 PMThe study’s heat maps above, aggregating predicted viewing data in color, glow reddest where people look most, and fade to dark grey and black in areas ignored, again showing how the brain directs views away from most of the glass building, and does the opposite with the brick one. Note how none of the historic house shows up black, and its door and many of its windows glow red, suggesting they’ll implicitly draw the eye. Even the house chimneys appear bright blue, and will draw attention unconsciously in pre-attentive mode.

Screen Shot 2020-07-12 at 7.40.58 PM

The study’s visual sequence diagrams, tracking the order the brain directs viewers to take in the scene initially, again indicate how, without conscious awareness or control, people focus around the edges of the glass building rather than at it. This indicates why approaching the building will be confusing, and finding the front door a challenge! With the Wythe House, on the other hand, the brain directs viewers to look right at the front door first! Amazing! That’s just what you’d want to see approaching a house or art school. And in the historic building, the brain keeps the eye focusing on the front facade, its architecture promoting a viewing pattern that’s more coherent, anticipating the viewer’s needs.

How can this be? “Facades impact architectural experience,” says Becky Chen, a student at the Boston Architectural College (BAC) who put together this study, and generously offered to share it with us here. “In my opinion, people don’t like looking at glass facades.” In this study, she used biometric software to reveal the hidden, pre-attentive traits that determine our architectural experience, showing how much pattern, color, areas of contrast, and different materials draw the eye instantly, which in turn directs our conscious behavior and experience of buildings.

So, what’s the issue with glass facades? The study suggests they lack the characteristics we evolved and still need to see, to secure us in a place, and ground us in space. We can’t focus or fixate on them; they don’t provide enough to look at. “Modern architecture can have the glass,” Becky Chen said. “But should have the elements of color and pattern to emphasize the space and attract people’s eyes.”

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More posts on the Issue with Glass Facades:

How Boston’s Glassy Seaport Fails + Why It Always Will!

“Your Brain on Glassy Skyscrapers” continued…

Posted in Architecture, Biology, Design, Eye Tracking, Neuroscience, People-centric Design | Tagged | 6 Comments

Empathy in Design: Measuring How Faces Make Places

Posted on June 21, 2020 by Genetics of Design

Since 2015, Ragusa, Sicily has hosted FestiWall, an international art festival devoted to enhancing the public realm and improving citizen engagement with the modern section of an old city. Here are two views of a residential tower before and after FestiWall. Which one grabs your eye?

Screen Shot 2020-06-13 at 7.07.08 PM

Ragusa, Italy. Original image © FestiWall

We’ll guess you’re drawn to the one with the art at right. Running the image through biometric software predicts you’ll immediately focus on the man in the mural.

Screen Shot 2020-06-19 at 2.57.47 PM

Analysis with 3M VAS (Visual Attention Software) showing how people take things in.

And that’s what the analyses above shows. Note how the heat map, at left, which glows reddest where people look most, is on the face; the regions of interest diagram which aggregates predicted views, indicates 98% of viewers look straight at his head. And the gaze path, at right, shows people look first at the face, then briefly away before focusing right back on it again within the first 3-to-5 seconds.

And what happens if the building remains as is, untouched – blank? Not much! 

Screen Shot 2020-06-19 at 2.58.19 PM

Analysis with 3M VAS (Visual Attention Software)

The brain directs you to ignore the building. The grey wall simply cannot get attention. Note how the heat map, above left, shows up black, with views going around it; the regions of interest diagram, in center, makes focus shift to the sides, and the gaze path indicates people’s attention moves to the street below, never once settling on the tower, even though it’s directly centered before the viewer.

“The festival’s main goal is to open a dialogue between urban spaces and communities using city’s walls and street art as a medium.” say its founders Vincenzo Cascone and Antonio Sortino. “This could be the first step towards a new perspective and a new development of the city.”

These striking efforts caught the attention of Caterina D’Amico and Isabel Gorham, students at the Boston Architectural College (BAC) who were interested in the way different murals engage the public, and which ones do so most effectively. They presented their findings, including the scenes above, last month.

“We compared and contrasted abstract FestiWall murals, with those with faces, with the original blank facades,” D’Amico and Gorham said. “The most successful murals, where attention is not dispersed, are the ones containing a face, a human form, and people in general.”

“Where the murals represent a person or a face, the attention is focused almost exclusively on the face or faces,” they reported, supporting the science on the face-bias in human perception. “Our brain is hardwired to find them; it’s a survival instinct.” Blank buildings, on the other hand, are “avoidant, and the eye does not pay attention to them, our vision diverted to edges, contrast, strong colors and light,” they added.

FestiWall murals are also a great example of empathy in design; the art that works best acknowledges first and foremost what we are built to see – a version of ourselves!  This hidden brain architecture directs our lives including our experience of buildings and our surroundings – whether we like it or not – and it always will!

It all goes to show how to best promote empathy in design: start with us, respecting the hidden traits that make us human.

Screen Shot 2020-06-21 at 11.04.20 AM
– – – –
Thanks to CommonEdge.org for reposting this article on their non-profit site July 1, 2020.
Thanks to Archdaily.com for reposting this article July 3, 2020.
Thanks to Archdaily.com for translating into Spanish and posting, July 7, 2020.
Thanks to ArchNewsNow.com for linking to this article on July 9, 2020.
Posted in Architecture, City Planning, Design, Eye Tracking, Neuroscience, People-centric Design, STEM | 2 Comments