A REVOLUTION in cognitive neuroscience is changing the kinds of experiments that scientists conduct, the kinds of questions economists ask and, increasingly, the ways that architects, landscape architects and urban designers shape our built environment.
This revolution reveals that thought is less transparent to the thinker than it appears and that the mind is less rational than we believe and more associative than we know. Many of the associations we make emerge from the fact that we live inside bodies, in a concrete world, and we tend to think in metaphors grounded in that embodiment.
This metaphorical, embodied quality shapes how we relate to abstract concepts, emotions and human activity. Across cultures, “important” is big and “unimportant” is small, just as your caretakers were once much larger than you. Sometimes your head is “in the clouds.” You approach a task “step by step.”
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How many designers are clued in to the ongoing cognitive revolution and its potential for the built environment is unclear. But this collection of architects and projects herald more than just another stylistic or pyrotechnic, technology-driven trend. They point toward how the built environment could — and should — be radically reconceptualized around the fundamental workings of the human mind. We need, and are ever more in a position to create, a richer built environment, grounded in the way people actually experience the world around them.
This is why I have an entire Evernote notebook dedicated to collecting "design metaphors." Also I frequently recommend reading Lakoff / Johnson's seminal Metaphors We Live By.
