Neuro-Design: How the Form and Function of the Brain Reveals Design's Delight

Abstract

The long history of art and science that includes Egyptian, Asian, and Greek philosophers and innovators of the Renaissance, such as Leonardo Da Vinci, offers hypotheses about the neuro-anatomical substrates that serve our conscious responses to design. In the 1600s, René Descartes described a dualism between the brain and the mind and, to this day, many continue to believe that the mind cannot be studied or measured. However, over the millennia that followed Descartes ’ writing, the development of electrophysiological and imaging techniques have revealed that the brain can be considered the organ that produces the mind. Wearable, wireless, and computational techniques have developed that allow us to study the brain ’ s form (neuroanatomy) as well as its function (neurophysiology) in alert subjects, awake patients, and participants in real-world settings. With the bene fi t of such methods, long-held myths about the mind and brain can be explored using carefully controlled studies in laboratories and in real pro-jects. In studios, students and scholars of design now deploy multiple methods to track the brain ’ s and body ’ s responses as we conceive of, experience, and test design outcomes in pre-and post-occupancy studies. The brain, mind, and body may thus be considered together in a new framework that no longer compares the neurons of the brain to a hard-wired computer, but rather an integrated dynamic system that changes with the experience of design. Neuroscience offers new means to explore the in fl uence of design while planning, creating, and evaluating a space. The neuro-design process can begin with and iteratively include existing bio-medical fi ndings and use a great many neuroscienti fi c tools to measure the responses of the brain, mind, and body. Qualitative subjective, and quantitative objective, observational, inter-ventional, or biomedical metrics may explore conscious, subconscious, and unconscious reac-tions to speci fi c attributes of the physical world. Thus, we can now study many questions