Careful Design: Using multi-modal data and virtual reality to bridge the subjectivity gap in architectural space-making.

Abstract

Architecture is a field that deals with the synthesis of many others. It is not just design and construction, but philosophy, art, technology, culture, user experience and all the intangible aspects of the human psyche. As such, architects, throughout their training and professional life, aim to build an intuitive sense of what makes any given space perform the way it is supposed to when experienced by the beholder. They support their decision-making with heuristics and rules of thumb that have been percolating since the beginning of human construction. This is usually a realm dictated by subjective experience and is, therefore, intrinsically imperfect in the way it reflects the architect’s desire and the user’s experience of the architecture. But does it have to be?

Virtual Reality provides the unique affordance of rapidly testing and adapting virtual environments to the real-time biofeedback, eye-tracking and self-reports of the beholder. Something that brick-and-mortar architecture is unable to achieve at sufficient pace and scale. As a result, VR has the chance of lifting, if even ever so slightly, the veil that separates the objective reality from subjective experience. I want my thesis to attempt just that. I recognize that I may fail to do so entirely. Perhaps the gap between these two worlds is not meant to be bridged. But that shouldn’t be the reason why I shouldn’t try, as I believe that the path, I will take may yield important and unexpected discoveries that, at the very least, may show where not look and perhaps point in the direction we should try to go next.