Design Educator

Our built environment has an immense impact on how we feel, the way we work, and the results we produce. However, most of the time designers struggle in achieving their design goals as they are working against them instead of for them. To overcome that, we need a more scientific understanding of how design impacts our state of mind. When we can better understand how our environment impacts our lives, we can finally embrace designs that support our goals in life and work. Neuroarchitecture resides at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and architecture, it identifies the emotional and cognitive impact of visual forms and incorporates it into architectural design. neuroscience can help designers understand how we perceive, imagine, and respond to our build environment ,for example, research shows that visual stimuli can evoke different emotional responses, and by understanding these emotional effects, we can discover how our surroundings impact us and our world. In this studio, students will study the link between architecture and human behavior and understand how our surroundings influence our mental processes through creating a virtual spatial experience that can enhance user experience, wellbeing or provoke certain emotional responses to encourage empathy.

Culture is defined by the way we think, feel, and interact with each other. Spaces in which we choose to have these interactions play a significant role in shaping our experience, behavior, perceptions, and interactions. It can accelerate our cultural bonds or break them. Looking throughout human history our relationships with the stars and planets in the sky have influenced human civilization, through agriculture, religion, literature, and art. All human cultures had a sky, and humans have always fantasized about living in space. With all the developments and advancements in technology in the past decade, we are coming to the point where these ideas are starting to look more feasible. Which provokes us to think beyond creating technologies strictly for survival. We can begin to think beyond human survival and wonder what human culture can look like in space?

In this studio, students will push boundaries, unleash their imagination and creative abilities, by transporting themselves into the future, taking a journey into space, where space is hackable and playful. They will explore how to build a human culture in space. They will investigate how our built environment change with zero gravity since all of the spaces we use are founded on rules of gravity. Moreover, they will explore how can culture turn space into a place. Students will be challenged to reimagine boundaries, use space limitless possibilities by creating a physical artifact that not only transforms human culture into space but also uses space as an opportunity to resolve Earth's existing spatial and cultural issues.

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The human desire to teleport the mind (and body) to distant places has existed across centuries. We see examples of this in early artworks and imagery believed to have the magical ability to transport the viewer through space and time. Italian futurists in the 1930’s imagined humanoid machines that could be operated via radiophony over long distances, allowing the operator to interact with and even sense the world around them. As technology has advanced, the idea of telepresence has become a more ubiquitous and accessible form of communication through video conferencing, VR and AR applications, remote sensing, and telerobotics.

The circumstances of the current pandemic have created entirely novel social scenarios and barriers to communication which demand a revised approach to telepresence. In this studio, students will be tasked with designing robotic interventions that can help mend these social dynamics and add a level of expression to robot/human interaction through telepresent machines.