The publicity for our Mobility, Mood and Place study includes a photograph of people walking across a park (The Meadows). In the foreground there’s someone wearing the unusual head mounted EEG apparatus. Everyone notices that. But neither I as the photographer nor many of the people who have seen the picture noticed a further unusual presence.…More
A sudden prospect
People pay a lot of money for a restaurant table, hotel room or apartment with a good view, but prospect has it’s most dramatic effect as part of a sequence. The geographer Jay Appleton (1919-2015) famously advocated that people prefer views, scenes, paintings, and by implication, landscapes, in which there’s an element of both prospect and of refuge. We are programmed biologically…More
Aha moments
Imagine walking along the pavement of an unfamiliar busy street. There’s heavy traffic, roadworks and people moving in all directions. Then you encounter an open gate, with green space beyond. You go through the gate and something else is revealed — a grand promenade, wide vista, perhaps a view to a stately villa now serving as a museum.…More
Frustration
“Frustration” is the watchword of those at sea with computers. Cumbersome fingers swiping across overly sensitive tablet screens shut down the mail app before the message is finished, windows appear or disappear as if at random, and there are all those irrelevant pop-up messages, obtuse instructions and uninvited features. The physical environment invokes similar frustrations. You know that the architecture of…More
The Internet as research tool
Good research draws on evidence — at the very least a body of literature that supports the answer to a research question. Can you draw on the Internet for evidence? As well as a body of literature most researchers would admit as evidence the results of experiments, observations, surveys, interviews, and questionnaires. In architecture, the arts and some other fields (engineering,…More
Introducing hermeneutics to an architectural audience
Hermeneutics is of course simply the study of interpretation — what interpretation is, and how it works. But to study hermeneutics requires you to come to terms with the philosophies of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur. To gain entry into hermeneutical discourse the scholar needs to come to terms with a particular collection of books and essays (a…More
Natural enemies
It’s tempting to think of the natural world as a casualty of sophisticated communications technologies. Everywhere, always-on networked phones and computers diminish spatial demarcation, and threaten the uniqueness and placeness of natural environments. In their 1998 book Contested Natures, sociologists Phil Macnaghten and John Urry draw on various sources to argue the converse. “As spatial barriers diminish, so we become…More
Interactive architecture
How interactive is architecture? These days, networked computer systems, tablets and smartphones seem to exemplify interactivity amongst people, and between human beings and objects. Perhaps architecture participates in this interactive milieu in so far as it embraces concepts such as “virtual reality (VR) and 3D worlds, game design (including 3D games, platform games, and arcade games), mobile computing,…More
Milking human kindness
I once knew someone who carried his money and credit cards around in a tattered, faded and frayed leather wallet, though he could afford better. I once asked why he didn’t buy himself a new wallet. He said, “There’s no need. I have a drawer full of perfectly good wallets. They were gifted to me over the years…More
Copy edits
No matter how careful you are in following style guides, there’s still a job of work in correcting bibliographies. Here’s a page after the copy editor and I have had a go at it. Back in the 1990s the author would receive paper copy bristling with little plastic tags and hand written notes. Now it’s…More