Mission Hills Park San Diego, California sandiego.gov |
Places evoke many feelings. For example, take a walk in a park, on a sunny day. Unless you are suffering from bad allergies, chances are you will feel happier. However, step on a pile of dog manure and your lighter mood turns sours over the prospect of having to scrape the odorous mess off your shoe.Sarah Laskow, in her recent Next City article, "'Urban Mind' App Will Examine How Cities Encourage Our Addictions," writes "...scienists have only recently begun to tease out how place and mental health are intertwined-how more trees might help prevent or alleviate depression..." While there is relatively little information on how the physical environment affects mental, particularly its impact on addiction behavior, empirical data tells us that a person's state of mind is affected by their surroundings.
Man smoking a cigarette theguardian.com |
"Ecologies of Addiction" impactdesignhub.org |
Lead researcher, Andrea Mechelli, is a neuroscientist at King's College in London and a clinical psychologist. Mr. Mechelli's speciality is psychosis, and the majority of his patients are at risk for addiction, marijuana in particular. However, Mr. Mechelli and his team: artist Michael Smyth, landscape architects Johanna Gibbons and Neil Davidson of J & L Gibbons are not focused on people with dangerous additions. London has the unfortunate reputation of being a city of tipplers and everyone, to some degree, is hooked on their internet connection. The volunteers were recruited via the King's College website; a serious alcohol-addiction problem was not a requirement to participate in the study.
The "Urban Mind" app for the iPhone architizer.com |
"Urban Mind" app screen shot nextcity.org |
After a preliminary background assessment, including demographic questions and some measuring personality, the app asks for simple asks simple questions: "Is there a view outside" and "Is it noisy?" Taking graphic cues, the respondents tap "yes, not sure," or "no." There an option to collect more qualitative data such as sound recordings of photographs. The app also asks the respondents how much time they spend online and how much alcohol they have consumed. Blogger speculates that there might be some inaccuracies in reporting the information on the previous two questions on the part of the respondents. There are other questions intended to measure impulse control, connected to addictive behavior.
Ecologies of Addiction launch vanalen.org |
Andrea Mechelli continues, "We can use digital technologies to try to understand how the built environment affects our well-being and our health, maybe it sounds a bit too optimistic, but I think it must be possible to build better environments." While the Ecologies of Addiction project may sound like it has potential to personalize experiences in built environments, it also holds the possibility of engineering the built environment in such a way that it controls human responses to external stimuli and turn cities into sterile places. Despite this ambivalence on Blogger's part, Mr. Mechelli adds, "It seems an obvious thing to do, but it's not really happening. Often urban planning is motivated by other reasons. Why should not be motivated by people's well-being and health?"
At the most basic level, it is not that difficult to comprehend how the built environment can affect mood, ferreting out the link between addictions and space shed light on one of the darker aspects of urban living. Yet, Blogger wonders how digital technology will used to deal with addiction behavior? David van der Leer says, "If we can learn about how addiction is impacted by the environment, we can make many more claims about the urban environment plays a bigger role in our lives than we we really want to admit." Blogger would like to add this, addiction behavior is also a physical and spiritual malady that affects everyone regardless of socio-economic standing. It will fascinating to see what data the Ecologies of Addiction project will yield and add to the body to medical and psychological research on addiction.
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