M-term Architectonic Context and Meditation Practitioners: A Concept to Be Implemented in an Informatic Application to Help Architects

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.