Lara, a postdoctoral researcher at Future Cities Lab, explains how the Architectural Cognition in Practice module studies the built environment's effects on people. The team uses eye-tracking, neural measures, and VR to test wayfinding, safety, and walkability in both controlled labs and real cities.
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Foreign. Hi, I'm Lara. I am a postdoctoral researcher and module coordinator for the Architectural Cognition in Practice group at Future Cities Lab, Global Singapore Hub. The Architectural Cognition practice module is all about understanding people in the built environment and how the built environment impacts people. It's also looking at how this knowledge can be translated into real world practices. So how can we make sure that research and practice actually speak to one another? So there are two different ways that we can look at how the built environment impacts people. We can do this in the lab and we can do this in the real world. What we might do is get people in the lab that watch videos or walk them through different spaces, or we might create VR environments of places. This allows us to really control our environments and really control the variables that we're testing. We can look at their eye tracking, where their gaze lies in the scene. We can look at physiological measures, neural measures. At the same time, we can throw people into the real world where there's so much going on, all these different complex design metrics happening and similarly see where does their gaze lie, how do they move through the space, how do they feel about it? We can capture physiological measures which might tell us something about stress or relaxation. Looking at the real world in the controlled lab, experiments side by side enable us to have a more holistic understanding of the human experience in the built environment. So there are many different things that we can look into. So from a very practical perspective, it might be wayfinding how successfully and how easily people can get from A to B. How can we design an environment to encourage people to walk from A to B rather than grab a taxi or not do the walk at all? How can we encourage feelings of pleasantness, safety, all these kinds of attributes the that contribute to whether someone actually wants to walk or not? There's two really exciting developments coming in the future. AI developments means that we'll be able to conglomerate all our different data sources to be able to have better predicting models for what human experience might be based on real world human data. It's also super exciting to see the interest in this domain of research is growing. So we've been working with industry partners for a long time to tackle different kinds of design questions. But with this growing focus on health and well being in cities, there's even more scope for us to make impact.
