Essay

Will Your Design Vision Work?

So often, as a designer, you must think about how your design vision will impact your occupants — planning for a not-to-distant future where your vision will be realized and used. For this, you may rely heavily on your own experience of what you think works and what does not, and you may probe into your occupant’s life to understand their likes, dislikes and so on.

Still, there is so much left to simply “hoping” you made the right design decisions for your occupant; and it is time that will tell the success or failure of your built work. Yet, there are new and arising fields that can and will help your architectural design process, as you strive to make informed and talented decisions with your building designs — helping you to stand apart from the rest.

These fields include neuroscience, biomimicry and nanotechnology.

Sharpen Your Innovative Edge

Eventually, new findings in neuroscience will meet head on with other rising fields like nanotechnology and biomimicry, and this meeting will certainly yield some new techniques for you, as an architect, to greatly expand upon (and in some cases completely revamp) what goes into your building design stages.

As it is, architects already must “predict” the future to some extent, but the best way to increase your probability of creating a successful design that works well is to learn more about those for whom you design. I know this sounds obvious, but on many levels architects can fall short of truly doing this — and then their designs suffer greatly.

So, get to know those that will experience your building, study how their communities and cultures work and what drives their collective and individual thoughts, behaviors, emotions and spirit. To connect with occupants on all of these levels and to best position yourself to use the breakthroughs that both biomimicry and nanotechnology bring, a solid and direct place to lay a foundation for understanding is with neuroscience.

Neuroscience will be evermore important for architects to grasp as new nano scales, material behaviors and nature-inspired systems integrate themselves into our built environments. With such new behavioral qualities, wouldn’t you want to understand how your “designed behaviors” will impact those “human behaviors” that experience your buildings?

I challenge you to get to know your occupants on a whole new level.

Image Credit: © Manky Maxblack | Flickr