NEUROSCIENCE IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT 2017

Executive Summary

“As the nature of economic output changes, so must the efforts that go into it.”Joseph Pine, The Experience Economy

Neuroscience offers an opportunity to ask more sophisticated questions about the

relationship between people and the built environment.

For example, why do certain buildings inspire some people whilst intimidate others?

Why can we concentrate in one space but not in another? What is the relationship

between artificial light exposure and long term stress? What amount of light is better

for sustained attention required to get through a long task?

Furthermore, technology is now working in symbiosis with science to give us tools that

offer up 100's of exciting and groundbreaking solutions. We are sitting in an era where

we have both the science and technology to make environments that are healthier,

more efficient, and less costly than ever before. 

The Centric Lab's vision is to turn the story of the built environment industry from

efficiency to effectiveness.

In late 2016 we won a MRC grant to work together with Dr. Spiers from University

College London. The grant afforded Dr. Spiers to join us for six months on

secondment, where we created the fundamental structure of how neuroscience

research would be translated into the application of the built environment. 

This Mission Statement highlights our story thus far, emphasising why neuroscience

will help, where and how it’s applied, and how those will benefit from its application.

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“‘Human-centred design’ and ‘healthy’ buildings are the latest buzzwords in built environment. Human-centred design is not a new concept; it is why products like smartphones are intuitive, designed around a seamless user experience.Dr. Dan Doctoroff, Sidewalk Labs

As the noted architect Juhani Pallasmaa says buildings "house our minds, memories,

desires and dreams".

So it makes sense that architects and others in the built environment turn to science to

help them understand how people interact, communicate, feel, learn, and heal.

If we look at buildings as places where people experience life, have conversations,

solve complex problems, heal, learn, or discover new innovations, we can start to have

a conversation about adequacy.

In other words, is a space adequate for working, collaborating, resting or innovating?

This would not only give us buildings that are truly supportive of human life but give

us the economic reason to push science into the built environment.

In an ever more consumer focused and experience led economy, where space shifts to

a service model, the greater the experience, the greater the return. Building owners

and city authorities of all shapes and sizes need to identify their ‘product-market-fit’

quicker than ever.

Imagine how it would feel to have data pre-design to create scientifically informed

spaces that increase the health, wellbeing and productivity by focusing on the human

experience?

In understanding the cognitive processes and physiological responses to built

environments, in understanding more about humans, we can look to link hardware and

software better to help solve the problems of the built environment industries that

have led to issues such as sick building syndrome and the environmentally and socially

damaging demolition of ineffective buildings and housing estates.

Our Purpose

“As the knowledge gap and methodologies between the medical sciences and the building disciplines narrows, opportunities for collaboration and applied technologies across disciplines will continue to grow.”British Council of Offices, Wearables in the Workplace, 2016

“It is imperative to base work on outcomes rather than places, to look at the tasks people need to perform for those outcomes, and to design the places around the tasks.”CBRE GWS ‘Lab of the Future’ 2016

Interviews with leading figures from both sides of the equation were highlighting the

lack of a robust framework from which to look at applying recorded subjective

experience to rationalised forecasting. One industry figure noted pain points in trying

to apply such heuristics as “so many of the measures of people productivity and

performance is entirely subjective”. This represents both the opportunity and the

problem - how does a field of research involving complex technical reading of

neurological activity be deployed at will to companies and people all over the world?

Neuroscience already has vast historical data can be mined to provide us with the

opportunity to make design and construction decisions using human cognitive data

rather than just intuition. We are categorising this research according to our bespoke

analytical framework taxonomies to build a robust database of relationships and

correlations. Our job is to answer the call from industry, “there is a huge amount of

research out there, and it is difficult to filter out what is reliable and what is not.”

Equally, neuroscience alone is not the solution, however it gives us a framework and

lens to understand people. Centric combine psychology and built environment

knowledge and methodologies to create a formula looking at the User from a macro

top-down view, their Tasks from a cognitive bottom up view, and how Space and

spatial heuristics can be used to refine the relationship.

USER <-> TASK <-> SPACE

Centric Lab see their consultancy framework as a User Experience (UX) toolkit for the

built environment.

In Practice

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Widely adopted and used in the technology sector, UX is the process of enhancing

user satisfaction with a product by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure

provided in the interaction with the product. User experience design encompasses

traditional design and extends it by addressing all aspects of a product or service as

perceived by users. By following our formula we create a model to understand a

persons ‘perception’ of environments and builds probability models of how a person

will enjoy, value and feel welcomed within spaces designed for them.

Transcending the bottom two hierarchies of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid, we

look to provide advice in orchestrating elements that combine the appropriate levels

of physiological comforts, to psychological comforts enabling a sense of belonging.

We believe that in this process we help clients deliver higher levels of health,

wellbeing, and scientifically measured productivity.

Our focus is to be space agnostic, it is all about the user and what spaces (like apps)

they use to achieve their tasks as effectively as possible.

The toolkit developed in 2017 consists of • Cognitive Profiles • Site Analysis • A-B Testing • Post Occupancy Analysis for In-Situ Design Interventions

We help companies evolve from designing with a top-down view, to a bottom-up

human centric approach.

“The current promise of the neurosciences is to valorise the qualities in our environments, which have so far been neglected or left to the individual designer’s sensitivity and creative intuition.” Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘Body, Mind and Imagination: Neuroscience and the mental essence of architecture’ 2016

COGNITIVE PROFILE Defining the Users and their Tasks Output provides guidelines to enrich the space for wellbeing and productivity.

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OUR BUILT ENVIRONMENT UX TOOLKIT.

SITE ANALYSIS Validating the Quality of Experience Output provides insights to amend and iterate intended design.

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A/B TESTING Elevating the Product & Experience Output provides bespoke IP from live data captured in Lab setting, e.g. Virtual Reality

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POST OCCUPANCY Identifying In-Situ Interventions Output focuses on understanding behaviours of environment to find effective design interventions to increase health, wellbeing or productivity.

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Our formula and insight is applied in design processes in wanting to understand;

In a digital world what does the future of work in a human-to-human communication

perspective look like in 2035? What are the changes in how we are attaining and

remembering information doing to how we learn, what will this look like in cities in

2050 and what is the role of space? How do we look to mitigating social costs of

issues such as dementia and helping those on the autism spectrum disorder by

creating more synchronised and harmonious yet dense urban environments?

In our first year we had the opportunity to work with leading firms. In respect to our

clients we don’t include names but this year firms we worked with included the full

spectrum of those intersecting with the built environment:

• Cities Planning & Innovation Group • World Leading Architectural Firm • Real Estate Investment Company • Lifestyle & Experiential Brands • Technology & Product firms

Our work this year covered the impacts and methods for understanding user

experience of daily life in cities, a deeper analysis into wellbeing beyond typical

physical comforts, the value of spaces that are restorative in face of intensive

urbanisation and densification, how the senses orchestrate to give a perception of

experience, and how technology will be impacting urban life.

As you can see, neuroscience isn’t about strapping people up to headsets all the time

but as Dr. Spiers said himself “it gives a lens to ask better questions about perception,

decision making and experience of people we want to help”.

We look forward to having you join us on the next part of the journey.

“The current promise of the neurosciences is to valorise the qualities in our environments, which have so far been neglected or left to the individual designer’s sensitivity and creative intuition.” Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘Body, Mind and Imagination: Neuroscience and the mental essence of architecture’ 2016

The Team

Dr. Hugo Spiers Director of Science

Araceli Camargo Director of Lab

Itai Palti Director of Architecture

Josh Artus Director of Built Environment

Graduating from the Bartlett with MArch, for 10 years Itai has been a practicing architect, researcher, and educator; focusing on designing with the human experience in mind. As a

practicing architect he has worked with Urban Thinkscape. He previously worked alongside the late Jan Kaplicky at his practice Future Systems, contributing to projects such as the

Ferrari Museum in Modena. Itai is a recipient of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture’s HAY Grant Award for his ongoing collaboration with leading figures in the brain

sciences. He is a fellow at The Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health, has edited its inaugural journal, and also contributed to a number of international publications such as The Guardian. Itai is the founder of Conscious Cities, a research and events movement.

For over 10 years his career has been centred around how technology can be used to improve the relationship between the changes in people, cultures, and economies and the Built

Environment industry. An Arts graduate by education Josh quickly moved into the creative built environment industries. At an early age running location library Amazing Space and then

going on to become employee #1 at Appear Here, the internationally successful “airbnb for retail”. He has built a career around and engaging with large real estate companies and

investors such as Land Securities, Legal & General & Peabody Trust, as well as local authorities looking to regenerate regions through culture, workspace and creative studios. Josh works with Itai in furthering the efforts of Conscious Cities.

Araceli is a Cognitive Neuroscientist, MSc from Kings College London. Araceli also holds a MA in English from Kings College London. Araceli has worked as a science communicator,

specifically in cognitive neuroscience for the last three years. Her science communication is both in the form of lectures/classes as well as neuroscientific reports. Her clients have

included Stir PR, NHS, Lloyds Banking Group, AECOM, Seen Displays, and Bupa. She also has a regular writer for the Huffington Post. Araceli is also founder of THECUBE in London and

INPUT LOFTS in New York City, both co-working spaces were founded to be and remain self-sustaining. It is also from operating these spaces and seeing human behaviour differ that she began her curiosity in how people interact within and behave in spaces.

Dr. Hugo Spiers is a Reader in Neuroscience at University College London and Head of the UCL Spatial Cognition Laboratory. He has over 20 years experience of conducting

neuroscience research on how the brain represents space and published over 60 peer-reviewed research articles. He has received numerous awards for his research, including the 2008

Charles Darwin Award from the British Association for the Advancement in Science and a Scholar Award (2011) from the James S. McDonnell Foundation (USA). His direct research

income has totalled over £1M, with his last project testing over 3 million people world-wide being supported by T-mobile (Sea Hero Quest) involving over £10M in supporting costs.

Currently his research team is working on projects with the world leaders in artificial intelligence, Google’s Deep Mind. In Jan 2017 he became Director Science at The Centric Lab and established the UCL-Centric Multimodal VR Lab.

ADVISORS

Juliette Morgan Head of Campus, British Land Plc

Prof. Xavier Golay Vice Dean Enterprise, UCL

Prof. Nick Tyler OBE Chadwick Professor of Civil(ised) Engineering, UCL

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We acknowledge and give thanks to those that have given their time this year, to

have helped shape everything. Including but not limited to:

Prof. Nick Tyler CBE, James Goldsmith, Prof. Stephen Gage, Juliette Morgan, Prof.

Nick McManus, Dan Huges, Charlotte Newton, Prof. Xavier Golay, Edward

Vaughn-Dixon, Kerstin Sailer, Nuria Hernandez-Rivera, Georgios Argyros, Sophie

Schmidt, Niall McLaughlin, Kenyon Adams, Sarah O’Farrell, Robb Routledge,

Harald Brekke, Fiona Tuttlebee, Jenny Jones, Amy Thompson, Mike Pitts, our

friends and family and of course Dr. Hugo Spiers.

“For us it is to create evidence, to challenge convention!”

The Centric Lab (London) Ltd Studio 5 155 Commercial Street London E1 6BJ

www.thecentriclab.com 020 7377 2797

Registered in UK & Wales, Company No. 10849927

Joshua Artus, Araceli Camargo, Itai Palti