State of the Art
3.1
Environment and Emotions
Humanistic Architecture (Mazuch, Rona 2005), Therapeutic Design (Connellan et al, 2013), Evidence Based Design (Lawson 2010) and Sense Sensitive Design (Mazuch & Stephen, 2005) all refer to an approach to architecture that “draws on international research in the fields of psychology and sociology, biology and physiology into the effects of the environment on health” (Mazuch & Stephen, 2005). The logic follows that “environmental characteristics can have powerful healing and therapeutic benefits for their users” (Ulrich, 1991a; Scher1996, Lewy et al, 1980; Murgia &San Martin, 2002 as cited by Mazuch, 2005.) Such characteristics include color, natural lighting, views to the outdoors, physical sensations like smells, furniture arrangement and sense of scale and way-finding (Mazuch, 2005). These approaches are concerned with how an individual person takes in their environment through their sensory receptors and how this is relayed as data to the brain, which affects both physiology and psychology of that individual (Marzuch, 2005). One particularly well known study documents that “students who are fortunate to be in a school classroom with large windows and skylights perform better on tests than those Fig 10. Mazuch's Biophilic Design (Mazuch, 2017)
in rooms with very little natural light — between 7 percent and 18 percent better” (Whitemyer, 2010). Evidence Based Design exists most prominently in healthcare design because of “the existing evidence-based medicine culture” (Watkins, 2008, as cited in Whitemyer, 2010 p. 10). This wealth of research reinforces that “evidence can be a powerful tool used to inform designers’ and architects’ decisions” (Whitemyer, 2010, p.10). In Lessons From Neuroscience: Form Follows Function, Emotions Follow Form, Upali Nanda takes a neuroscience approach by examining the impact of visual stimuli in environments on emotions (Nanda, 2013). Referencing Gibson (1979) she describes that the interactions between an organism and their environment are what’s called its ‘affordance.’ She continues that as designers and architects who “seek to sculpt not just spaces, but human experience and behaviour, we are designing more than environments, we are designing affordances” (Nanda, 2013, p.2). This language of emotional affordance is a
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clear way to encompass the idea of emotional interactivity
