How can architecture impact human behavior

Lessons like intentionality, and capitalizing on available resources to capture interaction and communication trends among students.

The optimal housing experience lies at the intersection of people, process, and place. Many industries have discovered that spaces can be designed to produce specific performance outcomes such as productivity or increased innovation. In the same way, the physical design features of a residence hall building can create or limit opportunities for student interaction, making behaviors more or less likely.

This supports easy wayfinding throughout the building and promotes a sense of place. Using environmental psychology and choice architecture to help inform the design of campus housing is about maximizing person-environment congruence when support is the goal, or how to seek an appropriate amount of incongruence and challenge when the goal is personal growth.

Here are just a few examples of the ways the environment can be engineered as a strategic tool. Clearly understood pathways and points of entry and egress are critical to fostering mobility and feelings of security, while the absence of these features often breeds confusion and anxiety. Most people find that wayfinding difficulties and disorientation are highly stressful, even in benign cases when the occupant is merely confused or delayed. Total disorientation and the sensation of being lost can be a frightening experience and can lead to severe emotional reactions including anxiety and insecurity.

Self-esteem and assessments of competence may also be affected i. Some of the most satisfying buildings and landscapes are a perfect mix of these two elements, creating a complementary relationship.

A central courtyard at the heart of the circle-round Tietgen Dormitory creates a secure outdoor environment where students feel safe and protected, yet still experience a sense of connection to the larger student housing community.

The difficulty is that your physiological state is the one that impacts your health. For example, when he walked a group of subjects past the long, smoked-glass frontage of a Whole Foods store in Lower Manhattan, their arousal and mood states took a dive, according to the wristband readings and on-the-spot emotion surveys.

They also quickened their pace as if to hurry out of the dead zone. They picked up considerably when they reached a stretch of restaurants and stores, where not surprisingly they reported feeling a lot more lively and engaged.

Another oft-replicated finding is that having access to green space such as woodland or a park can offset some of the stress of city living.

Vancouver, which surveys consistently rate as one of the most popular cities to live in, has made a virtue of this, with its downtown building policies geared towards ensuring that residents have a decent view of the mountains, forest and ocean to the north and west.

As well as being restorative, green space appears to improve health. A study of the population of England in found that the health effects of inequality, which tends to increase the risk of circulatory disease among those lower down the socioeconomic scale, are far less pronounced in greener areas.

Cities like Vancouver, whose design and building policies accommodate nearby natural greenery, are often surveyed as popular places to live. How so? One theory is that the visual complexity of natural environments acts as a kind of mental balm. Another VR study , published this year, concluded that most people feel better in rooms with curved edges and rounded contours than in sharp-edged rectangular rooms — though tellingly perhaps the design students among the participants preferred the opposite.

The importance of urban design goes far beyond feel-good aesthetics. A number of studies have shown that growing up in a city doubles the chances of someone developing schizophrenia, and increases the risk for other mental disorders such as depression and chronic anxiety. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg at the University of Heidelberg has shown that urban living can change brain biology in some people, resulting in reduced gray matter in the right dosolateral prefrontal cortex and the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, two areas where changes have previously been linked to early-life stressful experiences.

It sounds counterintuitive: surely the sheer number of people makes social interaction more likely. While this may be true superficially, the kind of meaningful social interactions that are crucial for mental health do not come easily in cities. Social isolation is now recognised by urban authorities as a major risk factor for many illnesses. Is it possible to design against it, to build in a way that encourages connection? Design in computer-generated environments such a VR and AR are seeing an upsurge as this medium has gained popularity.

A recent study [4] has tried to develop a new framework to bring an understanding of architecture and neuroscience interactions in designed facilities and quantification of the impact of design on the human experience.

The authors first built two virtual environments i. They compared multiple design variables with the use of windows and light to understand how humans react to such spaces. The participants were asked to conduct navigational tasks while their bodily responses were recorded by body area sensors e. The result showed that human responses in restorative and non-restorative environments had statistically significant differences.

With a growing world population and the boom of the middle class in societies, the need for housing and city developments are soon to follow. It is important that though design and architecture has an aesthetic appeal, the examples above show that it is more than just looks. It affects mood, behavior, and overall quality of life.

A systematic review was done to establish if the current body of research has shown evidence linking the built environment to altered emotional states [5].

The evidence base of this is growing but transparency, replicability, and the need to understand neurophysiological levels opens the door to understanding if we can support mental health and wellbeing through environmental exposure. Architecture combined with neuroscience and behavioral sciences can only be enhanced with human behavior research.

Working across disciplines allows for a better understanding of the characteristics of design and how it can affect human behavior and emotions. Olivia Heslinga Content Manager. Some interesting observations came to light with this research. Top of Page Planning for the cities of tomorrow As the population in large metropolitan areas around the globe continues to grow, city planners and architects need to take into account how these environments should be integrated into an ever-changing landscape of old and new.

Design Cognition: is explored through protocol analysis, black-box experiments or surveys, and interviews.