Resumen de Neuroarquitectura: nuevas métricas para el diseño arquitectónico a través del uso de neurotecnologías
Dependence on the environment leads to the adaptation of space to needs. Since the advent of architecture, successive space management activities have taken place. The result is the built environment, our greatest artifact. Like the natural environment, architecture has important effects on humans.
These effects have been addressed by different theoretical and practical approaches, with most attention being paid to issues more likely to be objectified. Thus, there exists extensive background on various aspects of construction that have crystallised into technical standards and regulations. However, these are not the only effects that architecture must address. Architectural design triggers brain activation, which raises critical questions about its effects on the processing and assessment of information (cognition) and consequent adaptive reactions (emotion). The fact that the effects of cognition and emotion are systematically difficult to study means that there has been less research in this area.
The awareness of the need for more research, however, is not new. The idea that the cognitive-emotional dimension can and should be supported by architectural design has been the focus of earlier thinking and research. The issue has not always been approached from a solely architectural perspective. Among these are geometry, the phenomenology of space, geographical experience, philosophy, and psychology. Each approach has its methodologies, quantitative or qualitative in nature. In various ways, these "traditional" or "base" approaches have been combined to address some of their specific determinants. These approaches offer a developed base from which to study the cognitive-emotional dimension of architecture.
However, traditional approaches often have limitations arising, fundamentally, from two issues: (1) the stimuli presented; and (2) the evaluations employed. On the one hand, the stimuli most commonly presented are photographs and videos, formats that lack interactivity. This experiential impoverishment can be critical, as the more that an environmental simulation differs from reality, the greater the chance that any results obtained will be distorted. On the other hand, evaluations are usually based on self-reports, which are prone to bias as they record only conscious human responses. The cognitive-emotional dimension of architecture needs to be approached from different perspectives. Thus, the combination of methodologies, especially the quantitative and qualitative, can provide a significant step forward.
In recent times new tools have emerged to address the cognitive-emotional dimension of architecture. These, to some extent, overcome the above-mentioned limitations. They do so by incorporating: 1) stimuli more similar to the actual spaces represented; and 2) more objective assessments of human responses. On the one hand, formats now exist that can present environments realistically. On the other hand, neuroscience and its applied technologies allow researchers to record and interpret neurological reactions. However, their potential has not been sufficiently explored in this field of study.
The objective of this doctoral thesis is to contribute to the research and design of the cognitive-emotional dimension of architecture, both on a theoretical and on a practical level. At the theoretical level this involves a bibliographic review, contextualised and critical, of the cognitive-emotional study of architecture from a broad perspective, considering various approaches, the traditional (or base) and new. Both approaches are addressed also on a practical level. The purpose in addressing the traditional approaches is to explore the benefits of combining the most commonly used quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The aim of addressing the new approaches is to validate the environmental simulation systems in current use and examine their operation in combination with neurophysiological measures.
