Neurotechnology and Architecture: how bidirectional knowledge exchange can create persistent impact
Recent advances in neuroscience have significant implications for the field of architecture and urban design, unlocking insights about people’s emotional states and thought processes as they explore their environment.
The applications span across building construction, the living experience, and architectural thinking, covering the full spectrum of the design process from abstract ideation to final product.
In particular, adopting neurotechnology brings value in two main stages: the initial design process and the responsiveness of the built environment. In both cases, neuroscience closes the feedback loop and reduces the ambiguity of how people respond to the environment on a physical and emotional level.
In other words, implementing neuroscience provides a scientific basis for in-depth, evidence-based design decisions.
1 — Neuroscience informs Design
Many people associate neuroscience with a purely medical context, but the field has become highly interdisciplinary with influences spanning biology, psychology, and computer science. Recently, insights from the field of neuroscience have impacted a wide array of disciplines, from marketing, to sports, and now architecture.
Why is the bridge between neuroscience and architecture uniquely impactful?
Consider the following statistics:
- The amount of economic resources lost due to common mental disorders amounts cumulatively to 50 million years, 12 million days, and 1 trillion USD according to Chisholm et. al (2016).
- According to the EEA, 20% of the European population live in areas where noise levels are considered harmful and damaging for health, especially in urban areas where people suffer from excessive traffic noise levels at night. For over 20 million people, night-time traffic noise has a damaging effect on health.
- A published study showed that inefficient design planning of hospitals has led to more than $200,000 in lost revenue, due to staff spending over 4,000 hours per year giving directions to disoriented patients and visitors.
These figures clearly indicate a nexus among the environment, architectural planning and well being, hinting that neurotechnology could be effectively employed to diagnose and even predict warning signs of environmental stress.
By demonstrating that environmental factors such as noise, air pollution, sunlight, colors and form have a significant impact on our mental states, neuroscience provides a credible foundation to inform design decisions. Integrating these findings gives an architect the ability to create more inclusive, responsive and efficient spaces that align well with physical and mental well-being.
In addition to adopting research findings and technologies, knowledge gained via neuroscience studies can be translated for use by new design tools. For example, the Brainspace apparatus is a plug and play tool that collects spatial data and biodata simultaneously, allowing designers to understand the impact that physical spaces have on people’s perceptions.
These technologies hold the potential that brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) will be adopted further in the design industry, painting a future where the adoption of neuroscience within current architectural and urban contexts will be a mainstream reality.
Ultimately, neuroscience has the potential to inform design given its scientific approach to quantify perceptual footprints and mental wellbeing on one hand, and allowing a direct interface between subjects and their environments on the other.
2 — Design informs Neuroscience
Design impacts people’s brains, as well as their psychology. The multi-scalarity and multimedia of design create a landscape of opportunities for neuroscience studies to be conducted outside of a laboratory, in more natural environments. Design, especially on an architectural and urban scale, offers new opportunities for neuroscience and neurotechnology to understand the mechanisms of our behavior within the real world.
Design disciplines, and architecture specifically, could create an opportunity to ask new scientific questions related to spatial perception. For example, mobile EEG technology emerged to better answer questions around how the brain responds outside of a laboratory, while moving through the real world. This technology has been adopted by several architects in research projects designed to evaluate the impact of spatial design on a subject while navigating through their physical world.
Questions designers are interested in, such as how to create effective human-building interaction, how environments impact an individual and how space is perceived are inexorably the same questions asked by the neuroscientists studying human behavior as people navigate space.
How does your building feel, Mr. Foster?
This headline reflects a new perspective on a well-known film titled “How much does your building weigh, Mr. Foster?”, a documentary about the architect Norman Foster, and his unending quest to deliver and expand architecture through 20th-century design aspirations.
Current preoccupations cause us to deviate from the documentary’s iconic title. Other questions have become more relevant today due to the climate crisis, a new sensitivity to social and mental issues, and an increasing presence of wearable technologies in our society. For such reasons, it would make more sense to ask: How much carbon does your building trap? How responsive is your building to neurodiversity? How does your building feel, Mr. Foster?
Nowadays, we can sense and process a large amount of data on increasingly smaller and smarter chips, as well as remotely collaborate with peers on design strategies, methodologies, and processes. For example, Building Information Modeling (BIM) software has been increasingly utilized within architecture, mainly to create a closed-loop modeling platform that allows architects and engineers to work collaboratively.
Specifically, advanced BIM facilitates studies of sunlight analysis, a basic procedure that architectural designers conduct to simulate the sun hours a space can receive. But what if we could simulate how a designed space feels? Or its emotional impact on those within it? Raising these questions suggests the need for a scientific approach to measuring the impact that design has on its users. To predict the emotional impact that a built environment has on people, we might already be able to integrate a number of techniques, such as facial analysis, eye tracking, EEG and galvanic skin response. Introducing these analyses as a part of BIM software might produce a better-informed design process by means of science-backed measurements.
Brain-computer interface at the architectural scale
BCIs have the potential to be a significant asset in quantifying complex spatial behaviors and subject interactions within architecture and urban design. These interfaces create a direct link between a building’s control unit — for controlling heating, lighting, cooling and so on — and individuals’ perceptual systems to provide a direct link between a space and its user.
Architecture can be described as a discipline ridden with major innovations since its beginnings. The role of the architect has been central to architecture’s technical and creative development. It has moved from bricks, to paper, to screens. Likewise, the architect’s role has also changed, from the chief builder at inception to implementation to an augmented individual by means of today’s hybrid wearable experiences.
The development of architecture, just like any discipline and cultural discourse, has happened within the context of its cultural zeitgeist, recently incarnated in the vivid technosphere of the modern day. Yet the increasing accessibility of consumer and research-grade neurotechnologies has provided a complex landscape of tools for designers, which require a diverse set of skills to be employed. To address this issue I pose the following question: What if the built environment could access our brains directly? This question addresses fundamentals about the role of the body in architectural design, how we interact with spaces, and minimizing the multiple interfaces needed.
The ‘ecological brain’ and a new design agenda
Brains navigate complex spatial contexts, yet they are primarily studied within tightly controlled lab environments. Armed with diverse testing facilities and state-of-the-art neurotechnologies, several initiatives are currently studying nervous system activity in real-world situations, such as the Ecological Brain initiative at the UCL. They have laid out the basis of an auspicious field, currently referred to as ‘ecological neuroscience’, ‘neurodesign’ or ‘neuroarchitecture’.
Similar initiatives are being pursued by the Berlin Mobile Brain/Body Imaging Lab at TU-Berlin, where researchers perform experiments using ‘brain-body concomitant recordings’, a technique that simultaneously employs kinematic body marker and EEG measurements, among others. This context provides an advanced way to investigate the effect of the environment on areas of the brain involved in navigation and spatial processing , which are influenced by specific architectural features such as color and form. Whether in physical, virtual or augmented environments, this field of study creates strong foundations for understanding interdisciplinary interaction and may suggest innovative design strategies.
Operating in the age of biology, where neurobiology and neurotechnology are major players, design;s future agenda will potentially deal with interdisciplinary questions related to ecology, human interaction, quantifiable footprints and advanced wearable interfaces. At this intersection — between the real and the virtual worlds — the spaces humans navigate will interface increasingly with our nervous system.
The emergence of research facilities investigating real-world use of neurotechnology points to a near future where interfacing with the brain will be central to our everyday lives. This may be realized by the ‘everyday EEG device, which may take the form of anything from electrodes integrated within headphones to tiny, remotely controlled implants like ‘neural dust’.
These breakthroughs would allow for a more interconnected world, and perhaps will achieve an optimal brain-environment connection in a not-so-distant future. These promising technologies, when — or if — realized, will have serious implications for society, including the way we design our built environment. They may allow us to create better informed, emotionally aware, interactive and even healthier spaces.
The industry
While the concept of brain-architecture interfaces may today seem premature, there are currently a number of institutions — such as The Centric Lab — that already employ business models built upon neurotechnology, analytical software and collaborative methodologies based on multidisciplinary design thinking.
On a global scale, technological developments in architecture, industry investments, and the sheer variety of neurotechnology products are on the rise. These factors are making existing design products more visible and fostering innovation within design products focussed on sustainability and accessibility. As classical design practices fade, neuroscience has begun to [produce evidence-based design recommendations via mining of neurometrics to understand the impact of space while it is naturally occupied (e.g. the influence of noise in an open-plan office).
The growing technological innovation of new practices that cross neurotechnology and architecture forecast a near future in which even more institutions will employ neuroscience-driven design tools.
Wrap-up
Environmental behavior studies answer the “what” questions in design while physiological and neuroscience studies can answer the “why” questions (Eberhard, 2009).
Neuroscience informs design, while design challenges neuroscience — a secret recipe for the near future of interaction between both areas of study. Neuroscience and architecture stand at a moment, where technologies at hand allow interactions in both directions, to expand both disciplines and create a positive impact within the fields of study, and on our built environment and users’ mental wellbeing.
Written and designed by Firas Saffieddine, edited by Cris Micheli.
Firas Safieddine is a Barcelona-based designer, architect, artist, researcher, and neurotech enthusiast, who coined “Electrical Ecologies” and aims at designing the first ‘architecture brain implant’.
Cris Micheli, PhD is a senior software engineer, BCI / biosignals researcher and project manager with Cognixion.
