ABSTRACT:
In the cities of industrialized countries, long-term stress with effects
on physical andmental health is considered a problem.Meditation shows effective
therapeutic benefits to physical, and in some cases, mental health. There is some
neuroscientific evidence, and traditional belief, that certain buildings may induce
contemplative experiences. The creation of these buildings by architects might be
mainly based in cultural, aesthetic and even poetic assumptions. Assumptions that
some-times might be in contradiction to the real needs of its users. We verify the
necessity of an approach to determine howmedium-term meditation practitioners’
behavior could be influenced by the architectural context. Our main objective
is to propose the development of a concept for an informatic application that
supports architects in planning decisions concerning architectonic contexts for
meditation in urban environments. A concept that should allow architects to know
which visual, haptic, and other architectonic context features influence mediumterm
practitioners’ meditation. We will meet with the research team to define the
variables to study; we will also use an experts’ survey and finally search in the
literature for architectonic contexts prone to be manipulated. This problem will
be addressed in four stages: 1. Understanding the interaction context; 2. Defining
the architectonic context variables to be manipulated; 3. Defining the body-mind
reactions related with meditation of medium-term practitioners; 4. Proposal for
the informatic application. To conclude, we will discuss the positive and negative
aspects of this decision sup-port tool, the variables selection, the subtleties of
meditation and this model acceptance amongst architects.
KEYWORDS:
Creativity · Architecture · meditation · expert systems
CONCLUSIONS:
To conclude, we will discuss the positive and negative aspects of this decision support
tool, the problems of the variable’s selection, the subtleties of meditation and this model
acceptance.
Positive aspects would be to allow the integration of data about the real users of
meditation spaces in an efficient way; to turn architects decisions more efficient, as
spending a lot of time gathering information and studying about how to plan these
facilities would not be necessary; to help to justify planning options to the client and
finally it might be an interesting tool for architecture students. On the other way, this tool
negative aspects or limitations might be its dependence from the Kansei survey volunteers
who answer the question, as if they do not have any experience of meditation, the
answers will not be the most adequate; the choice of the variables (characteristics of the
architectural context), as if it will not be well done and justified, we might get irrelevant
results; the difficulty of choice of the Kanseiwords that are related to body-mind reactions
associated with meditation.
Moreover, we must take into account that what would inspire us today might do the
opposite tomorrow, as our humor is very instable and dependent, from a Buddhist point
of view [13]. So that what we choose to build might result today but not function so well
tomorrow. On our favor we have the conviction with Alain de Botton [3], that a great
part of the world is against our most cherished comfort zone. And we need a refuge to
shelter our states of mind and our visions of happiness.
Another aspect to consider is that long term practitioners might not be so affected
by the architectonic context, as medium-term practitioners. And short-term
practitioners might be prone to not be yet able to sustain a stable state of mind.
We will conduct a survey amongst the architects’ population to explore this expert
system acceptance, to know better its viability for commercial use.
Comentários
Enviar um comentário