Architects, urban designers, and planners face increasing challenges as cities densify and buildings become more complex, accommodating mixed uses and diverse user groups. To address these challenges, designers and stakeholders of the built environment need deep insights into the cognition, perception, and behaviours of people who occupy their designs. Cognitive science has unlocked significant knowledge relevant to designers, allowing them to simulate, anticipate, and design spaces that meet user needs and positively impact our social, physical and psychological well-being. Cognitive science research methods, including behavioural experiments, psychophysiological measurements, eye-tracking and agent modelling, can provide valuable insights. They can inform designers in planning urban and architectural interventions to enhance the wellbeing and comfort of urban populations. However, the application of these concepts and methods in design processes within the industry is very limited. Our research aims to bridge this gap by facilitating knowledge exchange between researchers, scientists, and designers in the industry, at the intersection of design and cognitive science.
proposed design process
The conventional design process is characterised by linearity and separation between the roles of designers, researchers and users. Our proposed design process affords knowledge exchange and collaboration at each stage, thereby integrating scientific knowledge into the design process.
Background Study
The background study, led by researchers, informs initial design decisions through experiments on end users’ preferences, cognition, perception, and behavior. Insights on wayfinding, aesthetic and emotional responses are derived from evidence like observational data, physiological measurements, and self-reports. These insights guide the project, prompt reevaluation of priorities and foster dialogue among stakeholders, ensuring a user-focused and evidence based approach in subsequent design.
Design Responses
The initial responses from designers would be based on the background study, which provides an in-depth understanding of users’ behaviours. This stage is led by the designers, while referring to and translating the findings from the researchers. Upon translating the background information into the initial design schemes, the designers would then start a process of design refinement, through a series of design experiments.
1. Spatial Cognition Thinking cards organised thematically by practitioners and used to structure a discussion on user behaviour in complex buildings. 2-3 Group of multidisciplinary students, using the Spatial Cognition Thinking cards to discuss which aspects of spatial cognition can help understand people’s behaviour in a major pedestrian street. Saskia Kuliga 2019
Analysis and Testing
Initial design ideas are tested for their performance using user-centric analysis. This analysis gives designers instant feedback in order to evaluate their designs vis-à-vis the findings of the background research stage. This stage often follows an iterative process where designs are modified based on the insights gleaned from testing and the modified designs retested, until the required conditions of usability are met. In this way, design decisions are informed rigorously by the principles and evidence established in the background research phase.
some explorations from an architectural design studio, which developed methods and workflows for user centric thinking in design. Here student designers used an iterative process of testing-modifying-retesting with spatial analysis (of the permeability and visibility structures), developing and testing speculations about the social impacts of their designs on the end users. Anklesaria, Freyaan & McElhinney, Sam. (2022)
Gath-Morad, M., Aguilar, L., Baur, R., Conroy-Dalton. R., Sailer, K., Sax, H., and Hölscher, C. (2023)
The image illustrates the aggregate of isovists towards the outdoors, which serves as the base for the outdoor visual access metric. Buildings are found to vary greatly in terms of how much of their urban surroundings are visible from interior spaces. While entrances afford good outdoor visual access, buildings vary with regards to how the interior space visually connects with the exterior. This depends on the overall depth, but also the internal layout.
The donut charts illustrate the allocation of the facade (outer ring) and the building boundary (inner ring; i.e. between the facade and the plot line) to different types of functions. The joint presentation of the two rings allows the comparison between the function of the facade and the public space in front. Mavros, Zhong and Hölscher (2022)
Post-Occupancy Analysis
Post-occupancy studies provide a vital set of information, by answering the following key questions. What are the actual usage patterns once the building is occupied? What are the effects of the design on the users? How do the architect’s intentions compare with the observed use and impact of the spaces on the users? We employ various methods to measure and discern these patterns, including movement traces of individual users, surveys of user experience, and snapshots of footfall at different points in the building, among others. Such data helps to revisit the design, creating feedback cycles, augmenting designer’s intuitions for future projects by reflecting on what decisions worked and what did not. Rather than an artefact frozen in time, design projects are conceived as being in slow mutation over many years and decades, which can be enhanced by a better understanding of how they are lived.
Integration and Strategies / [ACP] Architectural Cognition in Practice
Principal Investigators: Prof Dr Christoph Hoelscher, Asst. Prof Dr Zdravko Trivic
Co- Investigators: Asst. Prof Dr Panagiotis Mavros, Prof. Dr Ruth Conroy Dalton, Dr Beatrix Emo, Prof. Dr Mubbasir Kapadia, Prof. Hubert Klumpner, Prof. Sacha Menz, Asst. Prof Dr Michal Gath Morad, Prof. Freek Persyn, Prof. Dr Thomas Schroepfer, Prof. Dr Bob Sumner, Assoc. Prof. Dr Bige Tuncer, Dr Michael Walczak
Researchers: Freyaan Anklesaria, Yuqin Zhong, Azrin Jamaluddin