Our framework

Our group's work centres on the core fact that every experience is impacted by its spatial context.

Whether that be how stressed you are navigating a mall, how productive you feel at work, or how calming you find a hospital ward. There is a plethora of research that indicates how spatial properties impact how you feel, think and move through spaces - from the layout of a space, to views out and materials used.

Every human experience has a spatial context. We study the impact of these spaces on cognition, behaviour and emotion. These spaces can be considered at multiple scales: from individual rooms or dwellings to large-scale ecosystems including ultra-mixed-use buildings, housing estates and even complete neighbourhoods.

Architects and designers are therefore faced with a complex and multifaceted job - they must address a range of sustainability challenges, whilst simultaneously designing spaces that cater to diverse population needs, and support the desired actions or sentiments associated to the function of that environment.​ Architects are asked to create spaces in consideration of expected user needs, and these are diverse and varied.

So, how do design choices impact human experiences, and how can designers be equipped with tools to enable integration of these learnings into practice?

Despite a growing interest from industry to apply evidence-based findings into real-world practice, there remains a divide – we are yet to develop a robust bridge to link learnings from academic disciplines such as spatial cognition, neuroarchitecture and environmental psychology, into real-world design processes.

Towards this end, we tackle these problems through a framework comprising of three key research stream:

• Fundamental research: aiming to increase our understanding of person-environment interactions and their impact on cognition, decision making and experience. 
• Reflective research: considering how (and how well) designers conceptualise their end-users. 
• Translational research: working to equip design teams with knowledge and tools to be able to apply learnings from architectural cognition.

Across all three streams, we apply methods and emerging tools from the cognitive sciences and environmental psychology, which allow us to measure spaces and people. These include physiological, behavioural, neural and affective metrics. Alongside this, we conduct spatial analyses, agent-based modelling, and prototyping. Crucially, our framework centres itself on merging these different perspectives and tools, allowing outputs from different domains to inform one another.

Ultimately, the goal of our framework is to augment design intuition and experience with scientific evidence from neurocognition, helping architects understand and argue for the value of architecture to shape cognition and thus tackle a range of societal challenges. ​​

Explore our site to learn more about our research across these pillars.