Architecture and Neuroscience; what can the EEG recording of brain activity reveal about a walk through everyday spaces?

New digital media and quantitative data have been increasingly used in an attempt to map, understand and analyse spaces. Each different medium with which we analyse and map spaces offers a different insight, and can potentially increase our tools and methods for mapping spaces and understanding human experience. The emergence of such technologies has the potential to influence the way in which we map, analyse and perceive spaces. Given this context, the project presented in this paper examines how neurophysiological data, recorded with the use of portable electroencephalography (EEG) devices, can help us understand how the brain responds to physical environments in different individuals. In this study we look into how a number of participants navigate in an urban environment; between specific identified buildings in the city. The brain activity of the participants is recorded with a portable EEG device whilst simultaneously video recording the route. Through this experiment we aim to observe and analyse the relationship between the physical environment and the participant’s type of brain activity. We attempt to correlate how key moments of their journey, such as moments of decision making, relate to recordings of specific brain waves. We map and analyse certain common patterns observed. We look into how the variation of the physical attributes of the built environment around them is related to the fluctuation of specific brain waves. This paper presents a specific project of an ongoing cross-disciplinary study between architecture and neuroscience, and the key findings of a specific experiment in an urban environment

No-matter: theories and practices of the ephemeral in architecture

The architectural theorist and practitioner Bernard Tschumi asserts that enquiring and working at the limits of a discipline expands our knowledge and experience. Within this thesis I examine the limits of architecture as they relate to the non-material and the nonvisible elements of space. As Mark Wigley observes in his essay on atmosphere, architects, at different times, have sought to understand, capture and control the otherwise ungraspable aspects of space. The elusive nature of such ephemeral architectural aspects and elements makes them hard to manage and map. Their examination provides a challenging exercise within architectural research. Atmosphere is such an elusive element; as Zizek would call it, it is that which remains always as a backdrop to daily life. It seems to vanish when subjected to conscious scrutiny. Non-visual sensations such as sounds, smell, textures, temperature, clearly constitute invisible elements that are notoriously difficult to represent. As a further example, event, the way in which a space is or could be deployed or inhabited over time, provides another unpredictable and ambiguous design consideration. Spaces relate to performance. The performance of a place constitutes its nature, character, function and meaning. However, the complexity, changeability, and potentiality of spatial performance render it as something abstract and non-representable. As Steven Connor, and Jonathan Hill, amongst other theorists, observe, new media, electromagnetic fields, and digital gadgets, also constitute invisible elements of space. They create invisible fields, territories, links and boundaries, affecting everyday spaces and relationships. So a typology of the elusive and ephemeral characteristics of space would include: non-conventional materials, elements changing over time, electromagnetic fields, electronic equipment, nonvisually representable sensations, situations, processes and events. Attending closely to these themes reveals some key questions. Why do these themes appear (or re-appear) now, at this particular moment in history? How are they related to contemporary thought, practice, and to current shifts in society, culture and technological development? New technology, new means of representation, and emerging design media change both the way in which we inhabit space, and also the way in which we understand and represent it. Digital media allow us to record and represent time and duration. Hence, events and situations occurring over time can be documented and studied. Subsequently, new media can also function as a new tool to think about space, and for designing accordingly. As Marshall McLuhan claimed in the 1960s, the emergence of new digital media has caused a ‘shift in the sensorium’ and has readdressed the significance and role of experiencing and sensing other than through the visual sense. In this thesis I discuss in turn a series of limits and the qualities of the spaces that they reveal. Each chapter title is based on a binary and a theme that indicates its transgression: (a) the visual versus the non-visible – the sensuous (chapter 2), (b) the discourse about the formal versus the material – the performative (chapter 3), (c) the physical versus the digital – the hybrid (chapter 4). In order to examine these themes and explore the design potential they entail, I review relevant literature in parallel with the conduct of a series of design experiments. The experimental processes deployed are of three kinds: (1) mapping and documentation of sensory situations, (2) design experiments that challenge the issues discussed and (3) real-scale interventions that test some of the design ideas at a 1:1 scale and in an actual place. The latter includes a major installation at the 2009 Venice Biennale on the theme of Athens by Sound initiated and designed by a team involving the author

Performing mimetic mapping: a non-visualisable map of the Suzhou river area of Shanghai

This paper questions issues concerning the mapping of experience, through the concept of mimesis – the creative re-performance of the site experience onto the map. The place mapped is the Suzhou River area, a significant part of Shanghai, the former boundary between the British and American Settlements, and an ever-changing and transforming territory. Through the detailed description of the mapping processes, we analyse the position of this particular map within contemporary discourse about mapping. Here, we question the purpose of the process, the desired outcome, the consciousness of the significance of each step/event, and the possible significance of the final traces that the mapping leaves behind. Although after the mapping had been carried out, the procedure was analysed, post-rationalised, and justified through its partial documentation (as part of an educational process), this paper questions the way and the reason for these practices (the post-rationalising of the mapping activity, justifying the strategy, etc.), and their possible meaning, purpose, demand or context. Thus we conclude that the subject matter is not the final outcome of an object or ‘map’; there is no final map to be exhibited. What this paper brings forth is the mapping as an event, an action performed by the embodied experience of the actual place and by the trans-local materiality of the tools and elements involved in the process of its making

Parametricism vs Materialism : Evolution of digital technologies for development

We build on previous technological developments in CAAD by looking into parametric design exploration and the development of the concept of parametricism. We use the phenomenological backdrop to account for our physical experiences and encounters as well as our mental ones; both evident in the link between parametric design as a process and an outcome. In specific, we previously examined two particular metaphors. The first metaphor addressed aspects of virtual environments that resemble our physical world; In other words, computer model as physical model and digital world as material world. In this volume, we extend the exploration into aspects of virtual environments and their resemblance to physical environments by looking at ‘performance’ aspects: the way in which environments are sensed, measured, tracked and visualised. Moreover, we reflect on matters and materiality in both virtual and physical space philosophically, theoretically, practically and reflectively. The second metaphor looked into the modes and means of interaction between our bodies and such virtual environment. Here we extend the investigation to look at the ways in which measures of environmental performance influence human interaction in real environments. The exploration takes us further to look into the area of design fabrication of the built environment, and methods in which developed processes meet environmental performance requirements, and the innovative outcomes that lead to disruptive technologies getting introduced into design and we revisit parametric design under this focus area