Do We Shape Our Environments Or Do They Shape Us?
Raha Riazi |
TEDxShirazUniversity
• June 2021
It is very important for architects and urban designers to have a premise of users’ behavior within built environments: where they move, sit, interact, play and/or socialize to enable them design quality environments that fulfill their diverse needs and expectations. Recent research reveal our cities’ physical environments have important impacts on our behavior, health and well-being considering their restorative/destructive effects.
Neurotechture (Neuroscience + Technology + Architecture) is a new term has been coined by Kaveh Fattahi to address research that focus on studying restorative/destructive effects of architectural/urban environmental cues on users' mental well-being, perception, emotion and behavior using Neurotechnology-oriented approach and new technology tools.
During last 3 years collaborating with neuroscientists, psychologists and software engineers, the research in Shiraz University’s Tech-Lab has focused on Neurotechture and how architects/urban designers are responding to the new emerging consciousness regarding the commodified, commercialized, personalized and even politicized urban inhabitants’ health and well-being in our future society. Tech Lab’s research aim to correlate the mental, psychological, physiological, cognitional, climatic and spatial data to introduce a new inclusive method of behavioral mapping in architectural settings.
Such research explores, from a scientific base, the range of human experiences that occur in architectural/urban contexts and hence help to better understand how complex cities’ different intervening factors affect our behavior. An innovative method that is bound to inform our understanding of how architectural/urban forms and transforms interact with users’ behavior. It shows how the way we shape our buildings, shape us in return.
Current presentation also brings about a serious question of if we should learn from Neurotechture researches to better design for special needs’ kids or its time to consider them as Special Environmental Alerts (SEA) who show special environmental awareness’ capabilities we should learn from.