Measuring How the Brain Responds to the Urban Experience

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2014/05/quest-measure-brains-response-urban-design/9046/

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Woman having her brain responses measured
simpleusability.com

 We live in an era where our responses to virtually every external stimuli has to be recorded, measured, and analyzed.  This is true in the field of urban design.  How do we respond to stimuli in our urban environment?  This is something that Mark Collins, architect, programmer, and professor at Columbia University's Cloud Lab wanted to find out.  One of the test subjects was Sarah Goodyear of The Atlantic Cities, who recorded her experiences in the article "The Quest to Measure the Brain's Response to Urban Design."  The goal of the experiment is quantifying the human brain's response to the city.  It sounds a little science fiction and a little Big Brother but the idea may have some impact on how our cities are designed based on actual user information.

Sarah Goodyear begins by describing her experience.  Ms. Goodyear relates walking down her familiar cobbled street in Brooklyn's DUMBO neighborhood, wearing an EEG device that resembles a cumbersome looking headset.  Her words, "...I resembled a character in a 1990s sci-fi rendering of the Future..."  The researchers instructed her to walk at a "museum pace," meaning slowly,  maintaining a robot-like (stiff) torso.  What the researchers actually meant was that if she saw something that interested her in a shop window, Ms. Goodyear was to turn her whole body, robot-like, pointing to the iPod Touch device in her hand in the direction of her gaze.  Ms. Goodyear admits to feeling a little self-conscious but in this trendy New York neighborhood, the residents are conscious (or act too cool) not to act too surprised at anything out of the ordinary-even in the name of science.

Participants in the Van Alen study
citylab.com

Ms. Goodyear was part of a group participating in a small study that was attempting to answer the question, "How does the brain respond to the city?"  The headsets used by the test subjects recoded the second-by-second reading of everyone's brain waves via a bluetooth device to iPod app.  The resulting gigabyte of information gathered from a pool of fifty participants, will be aggregated into a visualization and was presented on May 13 at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn.  This study is part of the the Van Alen Institute's multiyear "Elsewhere Escape and the Urban Landscape" study.

Mark Collins, on the main people behind the brain-imaging study, and his colleagues have been toying with the ever evolving and increasingly mobile technology that permits us to monitor our brain waves, with the hopes of harnessing the information in order to better understand how people interact with their urban and architectural environment.  Recently, the researchers have been working with the relatively inexpensive technology, the subjects are wearing in their tour through the DUMBO neighborhood, EEG biosensors from a company called Neurosky.

Title page for study
azuremagazine.com

"Brain-Computer Interfaces" (BCIs) could potentially give urban and architectural designers the ability to see the effect of their work on people who use it in a radically different way.  According to Mr. Collins, "It's the holy grail for architects, who are trying to be empathetic and really understand what people's experience is."  Together with his colleague Toru Hasegawa, the director of Cloud Lab, Mr. Collins has be trying to come up with a method to do just that, even as BCI technology changes from month to month.  "It's an incredible moment in the history of technology," enthuses Mr. Collins.  "We thought architects should project themselves into that."  Mr. Collins also acknowledges that technology is moving at such a rapid pace that's impossible to keep up.  It's a constant, albeit futile, game of catch up.

The Neurosky device
transparentcorp.com

The Neurosky device used by the during the participants' jaunt through the DUMBO took readings of the brain's electrical activity as it was being transmitted to the body's surface, the forehead in particular.  An algorithm took the beta, theta, delta and other waves, summarized them into two general states: attentive and meditative. The point of the visualization is to "spray" the data onto a three-dimensional map of the neighborhood toured by the group and reveal their mental state as they moved about.  Before the group set out on their walk, Mark Collins told them, "We're creating a new kind of camera."  "It's a camera for mental activity.  We wanted to really train that mental camera on a specific environment.  Each and every one of you is a pixel in our digital camera."  A human pixel, hmm, definitely the stuff of science fiction.

The researchers mapped out a several-block square area of DUMBO because the neighborhood held a diverse group of urban settings.  There are grand pieces of infrastructure such as the Manhattan Bridge; the narrow cobbled streets with boutiques and galleries; a public waterfront park; quiet residential and office blocks.  Not every participant through every inch of the designated area.  Different groups took different paths, with the help of guides to keep everyone from wandering off, getting lost, and troubleshoot any hard- or software issues.  An earlier version, using a single walker traveling around Lincoln Center, yielded a prototyped used by the team.  Mark Collins told Sarah Goodyear that "it reflected an interesting result: when the subject was in parts of Lincoln Center plaza that are more open to the city's streets, he recorded  more 'meditative' brain waves; when he was in the more enclosed and architecturally circumscribed ultramodernist part of the campus, his response was more attentive."

A view of the Manhattan Bridge from DUMBO
en.wikipedia.org

Mark Collins related that by nature, the data gathering effort in DUMBO was not quite a rigorously scientific experiment but more of a large-scale art project. Conditions were anything but laboratory-controlled.  "We had to embrace the noise," said Mr. Collins.  "In a sense we're embracing everything [neuroscience researchers] are trying to remove."  Still, he mentions that at first, the neuroscientist laughed then they got curious.  The study still faces numerous technological challenges but, Mr. Collins predicts that it's only a matter of time before the next generation of BCI devices reliably add another layer of information to take into consideration when designing cities or neighborhoods; when we make decisions about what urban experiences we want to go after.  Mr. Collins eventually envisions the visualizations that will allow the users to explore and learn about the textures of the urban experiences, whether as consumers or creators.

Mark Collins believes that interacting with data generating devices will become increasingly common just as wearing the now ubiquitous fitbit has become.  However, BCIs require more active participation from the user than a fitness tracker.  Devices such as Google Glass could make participation easier but wearing such a device can induce a feeling of self-consciousness.  Case in point, Ms. Goodyear wrote, "The other day in Dumbo, I didn't look at the app where my results were showing while I was walking for fear of creating misleading results (or getting hit by a car).  So I wasn't able to see whether I was in a meditative mode or attentive mode at any given point..."  Understandable, the conspicuousness of the device could cause  whole host of ambivalent feelings about wearing one and the feeling that everyone is pointing and laughing at you.  I hope Ms. Goodyear didn't check instagram or YouTube, kidding, maybe?

Sarah Goodyear concludes that perhaps interacting with BCIs will be more common in the future, even as the backlash to the smartphone, tablet computer, Google Glass continues.  Ms. Goodyear doesn't foresee any love affairs a la Her  but she speculates that we may find ourselves bonding with our devices in unexpected ways, if we aren't already.  "It's beyond sci-fi how these things are evolving together," says Mark Collins.  "It's not a human becoming a computer or a computer becoming a human.  It's a participatory framework between the two, and each becomes a little more like the other."

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