2.1 Complexity of Emotions

Emotions are extremely subjective. When discussing how emotions might interplay with architecture, we must start simply by defining them. According to the foremost textbook on the matter Understanding Emotions, emotions are defined as a “psychological state or process that mediates between our concerns (or goals) and events of our world” (Keltner, Oatley, Jenkins, 2013, p. 4). Linguistic researchers can’t determine “whether the disparities come from the difference of the quality of the emotional experience or the word choice when translating one emotion word to another language” (Karasawa, 1995, p.53). If it is this difficult to translate emotions from one language to another, how can we expect to translate emotions from experience into architecture? As architecture has often done, it is necessary to look to other fields for established methods as well as new technologies that may be borrowed and re-contextualized in architectural practice. This paper does not attempt to explain or defend the phenomena that architecture and environment have an effect on emotions, that has been done quite thoroughly elsewhere, though often within the context of healthcare design (Lawson, 2010; Mazuch & Stephen, 2005; Whitemyer, 2010). This investigation starts at the premise of emotional interactivity in the built environment and explores further how it might be recognized and utilized in digital design now that emotional analysis tools are a rapidly growing field.

Fig. 3 Tsinghua Facial Expression database (Yang, 2020)