Methodology
4.1
Design Approach Emotions are a rather vast and unwieldy lot. Adults can
differentiate between a minimum of 50 to 100 different emotional states (Fehr & Russell, 1984 via Karasawa 1995). In order to realistically explore how to deal with such a behemoth topic, it is important to narrow the prototype exploration to the emotions most relevant to a target end user audience. Emotional research studies are generally conducted in response to a stimulus. Environmental psychologists Mehrabian and Russell devised the S-O-R (stimulus - organism - response) paradigm to “explain the relationship among stimuli, environments, responses, and behavioral intention in the context of marketing and consumer behavior research” (Yoon & Wise 2014 p. 222). This paradigm is illustrated in Fig 46. Instead of exposing participants to an emotional stimulus and seeking to evaluate or respond to their emotional state, this prototype will instead be geared towards a demographic that is already in an emotionally heightened state. It is common practice in Architecture to tailor a building’s design to it’s target end user. In this way design decision making can be clarified and different outcomes can be weighed according to the needs of the program required. The prototype for this thesis exists within this framework of an Organic User Interface. In this case the target user of Grieving Adults was chosen. This choice was based on the following factors. Firstly, this group is historically and particularly under-served in Western popular culture and therefore digital media. Furthermore, by aiming to serve grieving individuals, the difficult task of incorporating emotions into architecture becomes grounded in its universality. At the time of this writing, a global pandemic has not only caused families around the world to lose loved ones, but has also robbed them of their abilities to gather and process their grief. Some headlines reflecting this new condition are pictures in Fig 45. In their overview of the idea of Organic User Interfaces as architecture, Nabil et al. establish that the malleable nature of these interactive environments necessitates dialing them in to a target user group. According to Nabil, it is important from the perspectives of both the HCI and Architecture disciplines as “both depend on building their design ‘concept’ on defining the 66
users” (Nabil et al., 2017). In an ideal world, an immersive
