The Integration of Interior Design and Neuroscience: Towards a Methodology to Apply Neuroscience in Interior Spaces

Abstract

As we know architecture and neuroscience were two separate disciplines, until it was found that the brain responds to stimuli and is constantly shaped by the environments we are living in. In the last decades, the rapid growth of functional brain imaging methodologies allowed neuroscience to address open questions in psychology and social sciences. At the same time, new insights from neuroscience research have begun to influence various disciplines, leading to a turn to cognition in the fields of planning and architectural design. Neuroscience is beginning to provide us with an understanding of how the brain controls all of our bodily activities, and ultimately affects in our behavior. In addition, neuroscientists study sensation and perception, how the brain influences decision making, emotion. For example how we interact with our environment and how we navigate through it, how we hear, taste, how we store the information received and how we can recall the same information, and how we react to various situations. On the other hand, new field of design called "neuro-architecture", driven by research on how factors like light, space, and room layout affect physical and psychological well-being. The idea is to understand how each feature of a person’s architectural environment influences brain processes involved with stress, emotion, and memory. Neuro-architecture is a discipline that seeks to explore the relationship between neuroscience and the design of buildings and other man-made structures that make up the artificially created environment that most human beings live within. The underlying purpose is to assess the impact that various structures have on the human nervous system and brain. More specifically, ‘neuro-architecture’ addresses the level of human response to the components that make up this sort of built environment. Examining how external and internal environmental settings can change emotional processes, such as stress and memory, is one aspect of neuro-architecture. Through all of the above the research aims to use neuroscience principles to input them in the design of interior spaces, assuming that learning how our brain works with perception will lead to new developments on behalf of users in design, and more specifically the field of interior design. It is therefore of paramount importance for designers to understand the effect various designs have on our emotions and then on our behavior to use it in the design process.

Keywords

• neuroscience; neuro-architecture; perception; neuro-interior design methodology