RESONANCES · Architectural atmospheRES: the emotiONal impact of ambiANCES measured through conscious, bodily, and neural responses.

Architectural atmospheRES: the emotiONal impact of ambiANCES measured through conscious, bodily, and neural responses.

Topic: Our spatial experiences are conditioned and altered by architecture. How we perceive architectural spaces affects our psychophysical wellbeing, behavior, and emotionality. This argument is not a new one. However, we have yet to consolidate evidence in this regard experimentally. Architectural research has started to interact with neuroscientific knowledge by combining their theories and experiment-based investigations. Driven by constant technological progress, their synergy fosters the study of how people perceive, imagine, and interpret the totality of sensory properties that constitute our surroundings. Design expertise can advance into a different dimension, shifting the focus from buildings’ technical performances to people’s emotional experiences, especially given the time spent indoors. The manipulation of ambient conditions (such as lights, textures, materials, and forms) composes what we commonly call “atmosphere.” Goal: The RESONANCES project aims to study architectural atmospheres. By performing a series of experiments (based on our conscious experiences, physiological behaviors, and neural signals), this research analyzes our emotional responses to the built environment and observes how interventions in atmospheric qualities can influence them. Impact: The value of this MSCA project lies in the opportunity to assess — through neuroscientific criteria and methodologies — the physiological bases of atmospheric perception to understand better the link between design variables and altered emotional states. Our experiments contribute to addressing the current lack of empirical data in elucidating evidence of how built spaces affect us emotionally, especially in a nonconscious way. Conclusion: The RESONACES project formalized an architectural theory concerning atmospheric perception, elaborated a lexicon informed by phenomenology and neuroscience, built a database of affect-based stimuli specifically conceived to study spaces, and performed experiments with subjective indicators and (neuro)physiological correlates to analyze emotional responses to architectural atmospheres. Our experiments consolidated empirical evidence of how spaces emotionally influence us, showing atmospheres (what is ephemeral and ineffable par excellence) exist, matter, and prime our everyday lives.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз