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Prof Kate Jeffery & Dr Hugo Spiers take part in Conscious Cities

22 May 2017

Two UCL PALS academics have taken part in the Conscious Cities Conference this May.

Conscious Cities is a new field of research and practice focusing on people-centric environments that are aware and responsive; using data analysis, AI, technology, and cognitive science in design.

Conscious City events and publications aim to encourage novel methods of observation, drivers for design, methodologies for the production of space, and changes in policy and governance.

Prof. Kate Jeffery writes on the science of our internal compass in Concscious Cities Anthology, noting that;

" Work in the past three decades has uncovered a network of brain regions that collectively form the internal compass, or sense of direction.

While Dr Hugo Spiers participated in a panel discussion at the Conscious Cities Conference on the topic of Creating Conscious Design, which asks: how does behavioural insight affect architecture and planning?

Hugo is interested in how our brain constructs representations of the world and uses them to navigate, imagine the future and remember the past. He employs cognitive and behavioural neuroscience techniques in his laboratory to study the neural basis of spatial cognition: brain imaging, neuropsychological testing, virtual reality, eye-tracking and single cell recording are used as methods to understand brain function and spatial cognition.