Experience and design: Bringing in the brain
The IBSEN model of Imagination in Brain Systems for Episodes and Navigation explores how the architect’s experience is brought to bear in the design of architecture by building on the VISIONS model of understanding a visual scene and the TAM-WGM model of navigation. IBSEN develops the idea that a building provides both views from various viewpoints and places where particular experiences can be felt, and actions can be performed. For this, the design must support a variety of scripts for both practical and contemplative action and the cognitive maps that relate places for them. Nodes from different maps may be combined as scripts are harmonized with respect to a specific embedding of places in three-dimensional space. The chapter examines the role of the hippocampus in episodic memory and imagination, and observes that memory and imagination, episodic or not, are construction processes. During design, long-term working memory links internal and external memory systems, providing priority access to (but not only to) memory fragments that have proved relevant to the current design process. The designer in some sense “inverts” imagined experiences and behaviors of users of the forthcoming building. As the book ends, the author notes that we are only at the beginning of new collaborative studies that take cog/neuroscience out of the lab and into the building and the street.