Introduction
1.1
Research Question The main topic of investigation is how architecture
can be more interactive with an individual occupant’s emotions. In order to interact with emotions, we must be able to sense or read them and respond to this information. Contemporary digital design in Architecture utilizes information or data, commonly in the form of parameters that affect a geometric outcome. These tools are ready to be directed at emotional reactivity within the built environment by architects. Though the technology for immediate emotional reactivity is not yet there yet, as this paper examines, it is coming. Architects must find their place in this dialogue between buildings and individual occupant’s emotions mediated by technology. By looking to two other fields that already interact with emotions as data, this paper explores how architects and designers might re-purpose many of the well documented methods used in Psychology and Software Engineering to deal with measures of mood and emotion. The scope of this paper is not to give a thorough state of the art of these two relevant but entirely different fields. Instead, it examines many of the ongoing techniques deployed by Software Engineers and Psychologists and speculates how architects who are already working with data analysis and computation in their design processes might deal with the data set of occupants’ emotions. This research objective stems from two core beliefs. The first is that digital design in architecture should center human factors like emotions as much as geometrical complexity. The second is that as digital media becomes spatial and immersive it becomes just as relevant to the field of architecture as our real-world built environment. This research asks: how can architects deal with emotional data as an input in digital design? How can emotions be quantified, analyzed and applied in immersive, virtual spaces? How can architects interact with emotions as information? As any method being examined is best understood from both the conceptual level as well as practical application, it is a necessary part of the research to build a prototype of this idea of “Emotion as Input” in a designed environment, explored in this thesis via a Virtual Reality space. This prototype is not a proof of concept so much as an investigative illustration. If site 16
data, material parameters and generative form-finding
