2.3 Cues from Other Fields

It seems common sense that architecture must rely on interdisciplinary expertise when designing at the scale of the built environment. Just as engineering is often repurposed by architects from the purely pragmatic to serve not only structural goals but aesthetic onesarchitects should look to psychology and cognitive science when seeking to understand and implement emotions. In order to do so emotions must be tracked, quantified and then analyzed before they are ultimately utilized. In the context of digital design practice this system is most optimal when running in an adaptive feedback loop instead of a finite direction, which is currently the more common approach in Architecture (Castillo, 2019). Commonly, digital design processes in architecture are created in an Acyclic Graph that does not run continuously and has a finite end, see Fig. 5. We can see this programming logic in David Rutten’s Grasshopper3D, though plugins currently exist to increase its capacity. We might instead also look toward Human Computer Interaction and how treating buildings as interfaces would allow them to be flexible enough to become emotionally responsive. Architecture exists in the exciting yet challenging space between art and technical limitations. Bryan Lawson beautifully articulates this quality when he summarizes that architecture is “actually a design field in which artistic processes and ways of knowing are combined with more technical engineering and scientific knowledge” (Lawson, 2010, p.97). As we seek to treat emotions as input we must combine our “ways of knowing” with the scientific knowledge of other fields that already deal deeply with this rich subject matter. The most obvious fields to borrow from are those dealing directly with emotions, Psychology and Cognitive Science. The second field to examine is another that utilizes digital methods to deal with emotions as inputs in order to interact with them: Software Engineering.

Fig. 7 Workshop on Computer Vision for Affective Computing Banner (Dhall, 2019)