Affective Computing in Space Design

Mariam A. Abuhadid

Architecture Digital Platforms are capable of creating buildings that provide comfort that meets human thermal, acoustic and visual needs. However, some building technologies can choose the physical energy arena of the building on the expense of the mentioned aspects of human comfort. Nevertheless, aspects like emotional and psychological human comfort exist in limited studies practiced in interior design, or in active design of public spaces and on the landscape and urban scale. It is not mandatory in building design: How different spaces affect humans and what makes an environment stressful or not. Study gathers literature theoretically and categorizes it per topic: 1) Affective computing Introduction and uses, 2) Human responses to different stimulus and environments, 3) Factors that affect humans, 4) Technologies like brain imaging and Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) that are used to measure human anxiety levels, as well as blood pressure and other indications on the person’s well-being, and some 5) Case Studies. Affective computing can be an addition to different pre-design analyses made to a project. Different areas of comfort like space dimensions, height, colour and shape can be the start of coding “Human Comfort” analysis software. Study has been restricted to previous research, and can be expanded further to experimentation. Future work aims to code it into Building Information Modelling Software.

This publication uses GSR which is fully integrated into iMotions Lab

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