tp bennett designs a fresh new spot for Aviva at EightyFen
A transparent, community-focused office design represents a milestone in the organisation's commitment to creating positive workspaces.
25/07/2024
3 min read
Mind Matters: Do places speak to us?
Tim Fendley – founder of award-winning spatial experience and wayfinding design practice Applied – explores how places can speak to us (and how to listen when they do).
30/05/2024
3 min read
This article first appeared in Mix Interiors #231
Words: Tim Fendley
Language is a uniquely human phenomenon. It is a method of communication between people. It’s also central to how we create social structures; how we develop thought and ideas. It is how we collaborate to build everything we have ever built. Part of being human is that we guess. We make decisions based on little actual information. Our opinions can be affected by direct experience or the smallest of details and prejudice. They apply to things as well as people; not often that logical. This is recognised in behavioural economics, a new field kick-started by Daniel Kahneman.
There is recent neuroscientific research that starts to uncover how the brain understands and relates to places. The discovery of ‘place-cells’ by John O’Keefe shows how we create a mental map of the places we frequent. Being sight creatures, we can only imagine what we can see. As we evolved on the savanna, we are predisposed to seek long views. The labyrinthine nature of our cities is a challenge. Most recently, research by Prof. Kate Jeffery explores how head-direction cells function and how they allow us to instinctively know the direction back to an entrance.
The designers of the cities and buildings that we live in did not have the benefit of much of this understanding. They did have instinct. If they used feelings well enough, the architects, urban designers and planners created places that blended well with our emotions. Often they didn’t. The Barbican Centre is a good example. It was originally designed to be accessed from the Lakeside Terrace – as soon as you know this, it makes sense. This route was never implemented and the centre has missed a logical entrance ever since.
Anything circular can be a specific challenge. One large circular space can work if it has a focus: the Pantheon; the Royal Opera House. Complex buildings such as BBC White City and Charles de Gaulle T1 are intrinsically confusing because they mess with our head-direction cells. They were a big idea at the time, but they fail on a human scale.
Jane Jacobs put it succinctly: ‘never forget that people make cities, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.’
This is the same for city layouts. London’s complex mix of grids and irregularity is in one way confusing, yet at the same time its village structure is memory-creating. This matters because the owners of buildings, places and cities want to encourage activity. They want their places to be a centre of gravity and encourage repeat visits. If places feel ‘wrong’, this is tough.
Studying neuroscience will make our designs better for people. It shows us that entrances need to be clear, obvious and different to each other; spaces clearly defined and named so that people can refer to them in language. Places benefit from difference, systems benefit from coherence. Transport systems work best as a single system. Station names need to be as unique as possible.
If we can easily describe a place or route, then it is starting to work. If places really do have a voice, they can ‘communicate’ how to use them. We get involved to help places that are already built, to work with designers to think ahead as to how people will feel in places they are designing. Jane Jacobs put it succinctly: ‘never forget that people make cities, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.’
