Access to data and the way we use it is shaping all aspects of housing. In this case, urban development can be tracked by our psychological response to the way that buildings are designed. And we can track that with virtual reality and other new technologies to really understand the impact it has on how people will live in and use the space.
Carlo Ratti, 2017 HIVE dean, will explore this phenomena in at HIVE this year. The BBC does a tremendous global exploration of the impacts here.
“We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us,” mused Winston Churchill in 1943 while considering the repair of the bomb-ravaged House of Commons.
More than 70 years on, he would doubtless be pleased to learn that neuroscientists and psychologists have found plenty of evidence to back him up.
We now know, for example, that buildings and cities can affect our mood and well-being, and that specialised cells in the hippocampal region of our brains are attuned to the geometry and arrangement of the spaces we inhabit.
Yet urban architects have often paid scant attention to the potential cognitive effects of their creations on a city’s inhabitants. The imperative to design something unique and individual tends to override considerations of how it might shape the behaviours of those who will live with it. That could be about to change.
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