FOREWORD
By Rita Carter

Science is not just about enlightenment. It also has the potential to bear fruit.
No revolution can truly be said to have occurred until the knowledge it has delivered is put to use in some practical way. John Eberhard was one of the first to envisage how neuroscientific findings could inform and enrich his own profession - architecture.

Essential to a new approach to design is the notion of interaction between the built environment and the people who use it. This is not itself a new idea - the effects of the environment on behaviour have been studied formally by architects for a quarter of a century, and informally, one imagines, since our ancestors first fought for the cave with the best view. But until now environment-behaviour studies have depended on observing how people react to the built environment after it is built. In other words, architects have had to intuit the effect of their design, and then find out later if they got it right.

Neuroscience allows that process to be reversed. It has revealed our subjective responses to the material world at a much more profound level than that of conscious likes and dislikes. Knowing about these largely unconscious reactions give architects the wherewithal to make better predictions about the effect of their designs, and to assess the effects in a much more detailed way.



Chapter introductions