Using current body-sensing technologies to collect data, this project aims to understand intricate areas of the brain related to different spaces and events that we encounter, which will be used create a taxonomy of urban concerns from a neurological perspective.
Biayna Bogosian
University of Southern California
Kristine Mun
NewSchool of Architecture & Design
Rendering of interior space of the Biennale Pavilion showing a projection of a computer-generated collage of “city beautiful” image derived from the two subjects’ biometric reading while watching videos of San Diego and Shenzhen. Beauty was determined by their duration of gaze and arousal/attention levels. Courtesy of Biayna Bogosian and Kristine Mun.
Jury
Luís M. A. Bettencourt
Leo Chow (Cochair)
Scott Duncan
Jason McLennan
Doug Voigt
San Diego is currently feeling the crisis of housing for the predicted one million city dwellers migrating here in the near future. Urban housing issues are facing an upward battle with the homeless population growing while housing prices continue to soar. Unaffordability, lack of housing, urban noise, smell, and light are all challenges that cause extreme stress to the residents. Evidence shows that these create and “alter neural processing of acute social stress” (Meyer-Lindenberg), a neurological response to the environment. We feel that in order to successfully create a healthy living environment, the focus should be on the individual. We believe any new urban development proposals would not be effective without taking into account the occupants’ conditions.
Research shows the chaos of urban environments, saturated with intensities such as sound, smell, light (or absence thereof), creates an immense amount of stress on the body. Many people living in crowded cities suffer from depression, loneliness, and stress, which evidence shows can alter the neural processing of acute social stress. We aim to tackle this complex problem of urban overstress by looking at the relationship between a user and their environment. Humanizing High Density can be achieved through the perspective of neuroscience where we measure the limits in the body and its correlation in the brain. For example, we know that the hippocampus in the brain is responsible for spatial memory; can we use this information to create easy navigation clues throughout the city? How loud is too loud, how narrow should an alley be, or how much ornamentation should be on our buildings to keep the brain active for goal-oriented pleasures. Statistical analysis of this data will help generate new architectural standards that give us clues about human emotions, feelings, and moods. Using current body-sensing technologies we collect data to understand intricate areas of the brain related to different spaces and events that we encounter. With this research grant, we aim to create a taxonomy of urban concerns from a neuroscientific perspective. This research will initiate the development of rethinking architectural standards from a neuroscientific perspective where eventually, the information could provide city officials, planners, and designers with evident-based data to be utilized in the design process.
Eye-tracking fixation point plotted in each video frame to measure what is attracting visual attention in the scene. Courtesy of Biayna Bogosian and Kristine Mun.
Neuroscientific Experiment
One of the critical lines of inquiry would be to seek the relationship between bottom-up, perceptually driven, and top-down, semantically driven processes during real-world navigation to help inform street illumination design. Thus, a pre-experiment assumption was that night viewing tends to be associated with less robust cognitive maps of the environment relative to daytime conditions.
Within this line of investigation, we laid out a neuroscientific experiment to see “How visual attention is modulated by luminance conditions during the day versus at night.” In other words, do people’s fixations tend to be longer or more clustered on illuminated regions of a scene at night relative to daytime? With a collaborative research team involving cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Ying Wu, Sydney Kessler, Weichen Liu, and Chi-Yuan Chang, we presented our research at the ANFA 2020 conference entitled “Strategies for Measuring Attention, Saliency & Luminance in Cities.”
To begin, we determined visual attention by measuring eye-gaze fixations in a visual field to see how people react to saliency in two contexts, day and night. Furthermore, we asked “How are people’s distributed patterns of fixation, influenced by day vs night illumination?” and “How does this distributed pattern impact visual salience?” For this experiment, we chose downtown San Diego
The implications of this research is understanding that saliency, as measured by entropy, may have a different interaction with visual attention than luminance does. For designers, this may be relevant to know what levels of entropy design can evoke; depending on the intention, one may want to design around high levels of entropy to attract the gaze, or low levels of entropy to blend into the background.
Data results shown in Pupil Player displaying saccades (top) and duration (bottom). Courtesy of Biayna Bogosian and Kristine Mun.
Project from Eduardo Macagno’s N-LEAD Summer Workshop, UCSD, 2019.
Research Topic: Fixations and Destinations
Question: Are vanishing points the site of the preponderance of fixations during exploration of images?
Tools: Pupil Labs – Eye Gaze Tracking
Setup: 2D images on a computer screen
Vanishing points are tools used by artists to construct an image or drawing on a 2D surface. The vanishing point, an invisible point along the horizon line, is the source point for which everything drawn correctly must converge towards. Would this work with the gaze of the viewer looking at the image? Furthermore, in the built environment, could these vanishing points become fixation points attracting the tendency of the eye gaze to move toward the center of an image or scene? The students’ hypothesis was that promenades consisting of their own intentional use of perspective lines and vanishing points will automatically pull the viewer’s eye gaze to the vanishing point. This inquiry began by sorting images from the Internet that had strong distinguishing vanishing points in its composition. Then, each subject, wearing the Pupil Labs eye tracker, views the images for five seconds while the Pupil Player computes the duration and the sequential views for analysis.
The upper row of images show saccades, that is, the order of dots indicates the order of the sequence of where the viewer was looking, their foveal point. The row below shows a heat map of the duration of gaze in a given area of the image. As shown above, the areas of the red show the longest time the eyes were fixed in that area, indicating that there is a general tendency for the gaze to follow the perspectival lines. From the experiment, they concluded that indeed the vanishing points and/or perspective lines visually present in the outlines of the building did accumulate relatively more fixations from the viewer. However, they also agreed that by studying the distractions, the eye gaze followed lines more as a reference guide while exploring the rest of the image.
Heat map displaying duration and place of attention in urban versus natural landscapes. Courtesy of Biayna Bogosian and Kristine Mun.
Project from Eduardo Macagno’s N-LEAD Summer Workshop, UCSD, 2019.
Research Topic: Landscape Effect on the Brain
Question: How do varying amounts of nature in a university campus environment affect mental and/or physical arousal?
Tools: Pupil Labs, EMOTIV EEG, HeartyPatch, GPD POCKET 2 Mini Laptop
Setup: Mobile multimodal biometric device, physical walk through the UC Campus, 2D set of images on screen
This team wanted to know if there is an impact on the body that is filled with natural landscape, devoid of any greenscape, or varying degrees of somewhere in between by studying visual and brainwave patterns. In particular, they wanted to find out how the brain and eye respond to different environments. How the eye tracking and the EEG signal differ in natural versus urban environments.
They started with a hypothesis that there will be different biometric responses to wild nature, tamed nature and urban, or no nature. Using both Pupil Labs and the EMOTIV EEG brainwave detector, they took a hunch prior to the experiment that, (1) Wild nature may react at calmer frequencies (alpha waves, beta waves) as a relaxing factor, (2) Tamed nature may create sporadic and wild waves going between the two landscapes, and (3) Urban may react at higher frequencies (gamma waves) since it is analyzing a man-made environment.
They first began by sourcing seven photos of wild nature, tamed nature, and urban nature from the internet that are similar in composition with eye-level perspective, with easily defined regions, at a minimum 1000 × 600 pixel resolution and that have elements of sky with depth of background to foreground. Their experiment took place twice, once in the laboratory, the other in real space. In the lab, they displayed twenty-one photos for five seconds each with a two second break. The images were shown in random order.
Using software EEGLAB to analyze patterns in brain waves and the Pupil Player to check the eye-tracking patterns of in eye tracking the early readings of the EEG patterns show that there was no clear pattern that defines all subject’s response, however, amplitude of occipital lobe response was higher than the average channel in all subjects and trials. In general, more subjects were necessary to get a better reading, however, early tests show that alpha and theta waves tended to peak higher when examining landscapes. There were obvious differences between nature, urban, and tamed nature pictures in the responses of each subject, however there were not enough similarities between the subjects to establish a definite pattern. People are more likely to broadly scan nature, suggesting nature may not have useful details on a normal basis.
Experiment in a real-world environment to conduct with a mobile multimodal biometric setup. Courtesy of Biayna Bogosian and Kristine Mun.
Then we took the test outside. The demographics of the participants are targeted (namely students at the UC campus) and each demonstration and testing of EMOTIV EEG and Pupil Labs equipment calibrated to each person. On a campus, there are usually more than one way to get to your destination. From this they picked two different sites for the experiments, one site (“The Village”) and two paths (urban vs. nature). The question was to find out how varying amounts of nature in an environment affect our mental and physical arousal, and how this differs between the real life setting and 2D images?
At the site, each participant walked each route back-and-forth once, with four stopping points on each route (twenty seconds in each stop) in order to capture the biometric measurements, which are, EEG, Eyetrack, HRV, and Subjective ratings on following: arousal (stress) and valence. The experiment survey finishes by claiming their preferred route.
The challenges were much greater on-site than in the laboratory with many equipment being sensitive to movement. In general, it would be necessary to construct a robust carrying system that is not subjected to sensitive movements. With this experiment, the students were able to make a rough conclusion that 75% of the group preferred nature over urban routes because it was quieter with less cars.
Overall, it appeared that nature increases our visual arousal, perhaps as a factor of color or complexity of the environment. Some difference in right occipital lobe in the lab, larger components of all lower frequencies for nature in the real-life test. Participants looked at nature elements more throughout experiments regardless of the path taken. People’s opinions on the environment—and where they looked—did not significantly change from lab conditions to real life.
NewSchool of Architecture & Design Students
Madhavi Natarjan, Man Yee Lok, and Nicolai Anderson.
N-LEAD Workshop UCSD Professors
Eduardo Macgano, Tzzy Ping Jung, and Kristine Mun.
N-LEAD Workshop UCSD Students
Kaarl Sippola, Man Yee Lok, Christian Lay-Geng, Seyar Kalmoni, Dakotah Tompkins, Maxwell Rossip, Enrique Carrillo-sulub, Tommy Hernandez, Yisha Zhang, Zoe He, Nicolai Anderson, and Jesse Yeh.
LA Lights the Way Competition Proposal, February 2020
Kristine Mun, Biayna Bogosian, Gere Kavanaugh, Eames Demetrios, Erik Yesayan, Fred Marks, Ying Wu, James Benya, and Deborah Burnett.
Strategies for Measuring Attention, Saliency and Luminance in Cities
Kristine Mun, Biayna Bogosian, Ying Wu, Sydney Kessler, Weichen Liu, and Chi-Yuan Chang.
Shenzhen Biennale Proposal, August 2019
Kristine Mun, Biayna Bogosian, Nero Chenxuan He, Lo Tian Tian, Eduardo Macagno, Tzzy Ping Jung, Siddarth, and Ying Wu.
Mun, Kristine, Biayna Bogosian, Ying Wu, Sydney Kessler, Weichen Liu, and Chi-Yuan Chang. “Strategies for Measuring Attention, Saliency & Luminance in Cities.” 2020 Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture – Sensing Space, Perceiving Place, La Jolla, CA.
Seth, Anil, Refik Anadol, Kristine Mun, and Neil Leach. “AI & Neuroscience.” 2020 DigitalFUTURES Virtual Online International Workshop & Conference, Shanghai.
Kirsh, David, Sean Alhquist, Pierre Cutellic, Kristine Mun, and Neil Leach. “Towards a Neuro-Ecology of the Environment in the Age of COVID-19.” 2020 DigitalFUTURES Virtual Online International Workshop & Conference, Shanghai.
Mun, Kristine. “Elderly and the Senses in the Environment.” 2020 NEUROARQ, 2nd Int’l Conf on Neuroscience and Architecture, Brazil.
Mun, Kristine. “Neuroscience for Architectural Design, Quality Assisted Living for Seniors Living with Dementia.” 2019 California Physical Therapy Association Tri-State Conference, Las Vegas, NV.
Mun, Kristine and Biayna Bogosian. “Examining Neuroscientific Modalities in Architectural Procedures.” 2019 Neuroscience For Architecture, Urbanism And Design Summer Intersession, San Diego, CA.
Mun, Kristine, Biayna Bogosian, and Dane Clemenson. “The Well Tempered Environment of Experience: (Neuro)Scientific Methods for Data Collection, Analysis & Visualization.” 2019 Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia – CAADRIA Conference, New Zealand.
Mun, Kristine and Maria Ludovica Tramontin. “Empathic Agencies in Urban Design.” 2018 SMARTNESS? Conference, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Biayna Bogosian
University of Southern California
Kristine Mun
NewSchool of Architecture & Design
is currently assistant professor of Architectural Technology at Florida International University, where her interdisciplinary research is supported by a number of National Science Foundation grants. She has previously taught at Columbia University, Cornell University, University of Southern California, and Tongji University. Bogosian studied architecture at Woodbury University and Columbia University. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Media Arts and Practice program at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. Bogosian’s academic and professional background extends in the fields of architecture, computational design, environmental design, data science, spatial computing, and media arts. Her interdisciplinary research has allowed her to understand innovation in design and technology within a broader environmental context and explore data-driven and citizen-centric approaches to improve the built environment.
earned her doctorate degree from the Architectural Association in London, Master of Architecture from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and BS in Design from Arizona State University. As an architect, artist, experimental designer, and professor, she shares her diverse background and perspectives as the head of Neuroscience for Architecture Program at the NewSchool of Architecture & Design. She is a registered architect in the Netherlands and currently runs a small practice in Los Angeles. She has previously taught at University of Southern California, University of Minnesota, AADRL-Architectural Association, University of Brighton, Pratt Institute, and conducted workshops at the University of Pennsylvania, the Berlage (Rotterdam), Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urban Planning (Bucharest), and Tsinghua University (Shanghai).
