Contemplative Spaces: towards a new design approach

Meditation practices: architectural features + outcomes.  Graphic by Giuseppina Ascione

Human homeostasis is the capacity of our body to constantly adjust to environmental conditions. These bodily adjustments are optimized for survival, and they operate through a complex set of interacting metabolic reactions. We sweat when we are hot, and we need to drink when the surrounding environment is too dry. It is about a dynamic equilibrium, where changes happen constantly. We are not always aware of these changes, except when they are sudden and large, leading to positive or negative bodily responses depending on how much the new environment leads to comfort or stress.

Physically, the environment can strongly influence the mental aspects of its occupants. Designers can take advantage of such potential to modulate different mental attributes, be they emotional, cognitive or relational.

Churches are the first examples of design exploiting physical parameters to evocate a specific mental status. In the Christian cultures, these types of buildings have been built with the goal of inducing a stronger sense of belief and a drive towards a superior entity in a collective ritual. John P. Eberhard makes a distinction, in his book (1), between “spiritual spaces” and “sacred spaces”: the first being designated for some religious purpose and the second being defined as any space that evokes special transcendent feelings within the visitor. But in both cases we are far from a contemplative state of mind is, that is to say a self-observation over mental state.

Meditation/Prayer Room at the Munich Airport  -  image by Giuseppina Ascione

Therefore contemplative spaces are not to be considered as isolated building typologies, just like churches or sanctuaries, but as integrated accessories for different building uses.

Usually, we are familiar with the idea of architecture that speaks to occupants and directs them towards the activity they are involved in, suggesting movements and actions. Less common is an architecture that “listens” to its occupants, giving people the opportunity to reach a climax to digest what they receive passively during their staying, and letting them complete actively their own personal experience.

Every performance and activity related to different building uses (commercial, institutional, educational, etc.) will require a specific contemplative space for each meditation practice.  Meditation improves the quality of our lives not only because it helps getting rid of bad feelings related to stress anxiety and depression, but it is instrumental to achieve or improve specific required skills. In working environments a short break devoted to the practice can help staff recover from mental fatigue or improve creativity, while at schools kids can balance hyperactivity with improved concentration.

The transformative and developing capacities deriving from contemplative practices, joint to innovation brought from invisible technology,  on the basis of a more  sustainable  and responsible progress, are changing the identity of a human being who is willing to understand and define his individuality in order  to get  control over it. The beneficial effects of contemplation in every aspect of our lives will enrich our daily routine and become an activity just like eating and sleeping.

                            A new daily activity - Image by Giuseppina Ascione

The implications infer that there is a lot of work ahead to define a brand new design agenda, a new chapter to face the complexity that different cases and variables represent: different performance expectations, various cultural backgrounds, individual psychological profiles, all to be coordinated with as many solutions as each singular issue can get. 

Gaming Architecture for Neuroscience

Can gamification be a design solution that allows us to integrate neuroscience into the design disciplines?

by R.S.Steenblik

With the death of Zaha Hadid, her canceled proposal for the Tokyo Olympics, and the announcement by Chinese president Xi Jinping of “no more weird architecture”, I believe we are at the end of an era. Pragmatism is regaining its footing after the digital revolution has allowed imaginations and buildings to run wild. I believe that there were good ambitions at the heart of such an era. To some degree those ambitions were successful in accomplishing at least part of what it set out to accomplish: inspire people through amazing spaces.

Image by Deezen 

I share that ambition. When I was working on my bachelors degree I wrote a somewhat naive ambition: "the environments that I create will be spaces of change for the better. Places where scientific discoveries happen, places where people fall in love, places where great organizations are created, and causes identified and championed. I want to create the places where the next Einstein is taught Newton’s Laws. Where his E=mc2 is epiphanized." This statement reminds me of Giuseppina Ascione’s ambitious call for a balanced approach to designing using principles of Human Centered Design. From where I sit now, it is easy to get lost in the minutia and to forget what my original motivations were.

The overlap between neuroscience and architecture provides a small glimpse back into my initial ambition. In order to get there, I believe that questions about the logistics or the process of a neuroscience / architecture collaboration are on the minds of thinkers and practitioners around the world.

Often, the more experts that are involved the more inefficient the process becomes. Yet as a person who appreciates complexity, I imagine the perfect client who would be willing to bring experts on from many disciplines to capture the nuances from each background to achieve magnificence: All the standard architectural consultants plus and UX designer, human dynamics engineer, ergonomics engineer, industrial designer, Historian, Artists, Neuro/physiological expert, Data scientist, Urban Planner, Feng Shui expert, cyclical ecologist, etc.

Yet such an accumulation might infer that a government agency with all of its bureaucratic processes would have to be behind it. It could easily become a never ending project that doesn't actually do what you had hoped (or possibly at an inflated cost). Another approach might be presenting itself through gamification and peer to peer problem solving. Can gamification be a design solution that allows us to integrate neuroscience into the design disciplines?

Gropius will get an answer: There is a science of design!

There is a frantic activity going on over new guidelines to design quality buildings and urban spaces. Events, conferences, grants are arranged almost simultaneously and often ignoring each other, causing a kind of energy loss that sometimes hinders the collaboration between different disciplines or between interdisciplinary teams. It seems they tend to highlight diverging points instead of take advatage of the common fields, maybe because there is still confusion about which scientific references should be engaged. 

Walter Gropius

Just in the first half of this year there are London, where he has just finished Conscious Cities, San Diego, where the ANFA opens to new research studies to be presented at its International Conference next September. Seattle will soon be home of a summit that seals a marriage between Living Building Challenge and the research institute Terrapin, center of Biophilic Design, and in the meanwhile Rick Fedrizzi, perhaps conscious of the limits that LEED credits may have over occupant's wellness within a buiding, opens the door to the WELL Building Standard. 

There are also other research initiatives, among which the neuroarchitecture research "ROOMS" (IUAV among its main partners), that may be considered a "global" and "diagonal" initiative . Rooms tries to overcome economic and bureaucratic obstacles through an original model of crowdfunding that allows everybody (designers and users) to be involved in the investigation. 

What emerges from this phenomenon is the need to perform a change of gear in the world of design and its own way of doing research. Research no longer dwell within the walls of Accademy, but begins to be swallowed up by the business world and its appetite for smart investments, whose purpose is "ethical" rather than purely about profit. It is disoriented, and at the same time creates disorientation in those who have so far considered it a firm and safe reference in research. Universities have got the feeling of a new wave coming, although most of them, expecially in Europe, are trying to adapt and proceed with elephantine pace, worried of contamination and identity change.

Journal of Design and Science

Very breaking news are those about the the MIT media "Journal Of Design and Science" who have announced to engage a radical new way to lead and legitimize research - actually already adopted by other minor journals- through a more democratic framework that is based on the "pier to pier review". This framework bypasses the traditional, anonimous and slow procedure (peer review) and opens to anyone who believes having something interesting to say. 

Is there a risk for trivialization of the problem, or are we facing the opportunity to give voice to whom has been cut off from the dialogue due to dated and obsolete system? 

This inclusive attitude in the design research (we give for granted an estabilished sustainable/human-centered design), is required and absolutely beneficial. A "antidisciplinarity" against interdisciplinarity, just to quote Jui Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, can be the right answer to involve key actors from different cultural backgrounds, who finally can show up and leave behind their sterile criticism of posthumous and useless interventions. 

Why should we exclude categories that we know having an important role in modeling our environments, such as psychologists, philosophers, artists ?