Building Better Minds: Neuroarchitecture and the Future of Inclusive Design

In this episode, host Jade Hunter sits down with Professor Hugo Spiers, Dr Fiona Zisch, and Isabelle Sjövall, the trailblazing team behind the world’s first international centre for neuroarchitecture.

In the second episode of our Mental Health and Wellbeing mini-series, host Jade Hunter sits down with Professor Hugo Spiers, Dr Fiona Zisch, and Isabelle Sjovall, the trailblazing team behind the world’s first international centre for neuroarchitecture and neurodesign. Together, they delve into how neuroscience and the built environment are converging to shape healthier, more inclusive spaces for everyone.

This wide-ranging conversation touches on the potential of this pioneering field to transform sectors such as healthcare, education, and urban planning. With deep insights from research and practice, the episode explores how our brains respond to the spaces we inhabit, and how better design can enhance wellbeing, accessibility, and human connection.

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 Discussed in this episode:

• The origins of neuroarchitecture and the launch of a world-first international centre.
• Why collaboration. between neuroscience, architecture, and design matters.
• Inclusive design and its relevance across sectors.
• How neuroscience can deepen our understanding of human interaction with space.
• The role of partnerships like RISE in creating a collaborative hub for research and practice.
• Connections to UCL’s Grand Challenge of Mental Health.
• The challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinary work.
• Industry perspectives and the need for evidence-led design.
• How emerging technologies are shaping the future of neurodesign.
• Ways to learn more about the centre’s work and upcoming initiatives.

Featured in this episode:

• Host: Jade Hunter – Coordinator, UCL’s Grand Challenge of Mental Health & Wellbeing
  With special thanks to our guests: 
• Professor Hugo Spiers – UCL Department of Experimental Psychology
• Dr Fiona Zisch - Associate Professor in Architecture, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture
• Isabelle Sjövall– Design Strategist and Co-Founder, Centre for Neuroarchitecture 

Resources:

• Learn more about UCL Grand Challenges
• Read about the project’s progress and future outputs via the Grand Challenges Mental Health and Wellbeing page

Disruptive Voices is a podcast from UCL Grand Challenges, proudly produced by Decibelle Creative / @decibelle_creative.

Transcript

Jade: Hello and welcome to this episode of Disruptive Voices from UCL Grand Challenges. I'm Jade Hunter, your host and the coordinator for UCL's Grand Challenge of Mental Health and Wellbeing. In today's episode, we're diving into the fascinating world of neuroarchitecture and neurodesign, a groundbreaking field of research at the intersection of brain science, design and technology. I'm joined by three brilliant minds from UCL who are leading the way in this space. Professor Hugo Spiers  Dr. Fiona Zisch and Isabelle Sjövall. They are co founders and directors of the world's first international centre for Neuro Architecture and Neuro Design. Together they will share how this innovative centre is combining science and technology to design spaces that foster healthier, inclusive environments for everyone. So we'll start by introducing today's experts. Hugo is professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at, the Department of Experimental Psychology and is Vice Dean of Enterprise and Innovation in the Faculty of Brain Sciences at ucl. Fiona is Associate professor in Architecture and Programme Director for Design for Performance and Interaction at the Bartlett School of Architecture. And Isabel is a neurodesigner and brain researcher at the Department of Experimental Psychology. So thank you all for joining me today. Hugo, to start us off, could you tell us a bit about why you think this is the right moment to bring neuroscience, architecture and design together, please?

Hugo Spiers : Yeah, this is the perfect moment. It's been a long time coming. It's been a 20 year ambition to put together brain science with architecture to build a better world that's founded on building environments for people. But the big challenge I think has been getting the technology and the kind of interest there. These two things you need to have the right technology and you need to have a kind of groundswell motivation to do this. And I think this seems to be the time that's happened and they've coincided. a lot of science happens by technological changes and I think this is partly the case here. but yeah, generally across the Internet on, you know, LinkedIn particularly, you can see a lot of interest in neuroarchitecture rising people interested in what can we bring from the study of people's behaviour in their brains to help us build and design better spaces? Both the interior design and the architecture. Architecture has been obsessed with this for a long time. This is nothing, nothing new. I'm sure Fiona will speak to that. and Isabelle, talked to the design. It's not something magic and new. But I think the excitement for me in a nutshell is the fact that the neuroscience can help lift under the lid inside our heads. and you, just can't ask someone every millisecond what they're thinking or feeling. and brain science can actually. It can't do that. It doesn't tell you what you're thinking or feeling. It's not. It's not a, you know, litmus test, but it can actually. You can read out special things about people and you can start to look at populations. So now is the right time for all those reasons.

Jade: That's great. And is there something you could say about. you spoke about interest on LinkedIn and sort of a groundswell behind that. Are there particular sectors that are interested in that more than others or.

Hugo Spiers : Yeah, I think there are multiple sectors. I think that's why it's an exciting time. If it was just one sector interested, that would be. That's interesting. But it's because there are many sectors, they're all overlapping. So you can see in the kind of general design of spaces. So people who design, the public realm, there's interest there. How do we make playgrounds, public squares, art galleries effectively successful and enriching for people? that's one area, of course. You see, the healthcare sector, we want hospitals that make people healthier. you want cities that avoid hospitals, you know, that are designed to improve our health. and real estate, you know, when you. When you design, create a large building and you manage that building, you want a good return on investment. And if people really like that, that place is extremely successful. You have people knocking on your door to pay you to use your buildings. So real estate's another big area where this sort of opportunity. And of course, transport, you know, I don't know how many airports. You've loved spending hours in the airport, but in the future we might start to enjoy undergrounds and airports because we designed them better. There's obviously big constraints, but I think under the final sector, you can imagine, unsurprisingly, we're sitting in a university, is the education sector. How do you create spaces where people can learn and think and be creative in? So it's many, many sectors, all realising the power. And the final one that's driving some of this is inclusive design. And again, a lot of these topics are not new. People have been thinking about inclusive design for a very long time, but there's becoming a kind of real demand from clients for companies who design. The clients want inclusive design as part of what is being offered by the company. so I think there's all these things and of course, climate change,

00:05:00

Hugo Spiers : the climate disaster, you know, is affecting everything. So. And, there's a huge rise in, Is very relevant to our discussion today. Mental health and well being. How do you design to improve environments? And the kind of word we might use a lot as a team might be flourishing. We flourish as a, as a. In a community. How do we make the entire planet, not just humans, but the entire ecosystems on our planet, flourish through the designs we put into the environment?

Jade: That's really interesting. So it sounds like it's very sort of widespread and, yeah, there's lots of kind of potential impacts there. Fiona, I wonder if I could sort of move to you and just think about what are your hopes for the Centre and, what sort of impacts you're hoping to, create through this work.

Fiona Zisch: Yeah, great, thank you, Jade. I think Hugo's already mentioned quite a lot of the kind of the. The variety of work that we're interested in and that's obviously not just based on our interest, but it's us kind of reading the signs. It's been a long time coming. He's mentioned that architecture and design have had long interest in kind of understanding human better in the built environment, but recently also in other forms of environments that we inhabit. We no longer just dwell in kind of bricks and mortar buildings, but we inhabit all sorts of online, digital, virtual hybrid spaces. And, that's obviously a key thing that we want to understand more so that we can improve and refine for people, that we can make more inclusive spaces, that we can create healthier environments and that we can overall be more sustainable, obviously in terms of the environment. But I think we can think wider than that in an ecological sense. Social sustainability is a big thing that we're interested in because obviously they're all entangled. Hugo's spoken a lot about questions of application, in one sense that we're thinking about the different sectors out there in the world that are interested in what we're doing because they want to harness the knowledge that we can contribute in an academic context in order to improve the spaces that we build, the environments that we create. But equally, one of the ambitions that we have for the Centre is to make discoveries. And it's almost like we've kind of got a role reversal of Hugo and me taking each other's roles in what we're saying here today is. But it's really important that we also use this to make more discoveries about humans, about human brains and human bodies and how they interact with each other, with built and other environments. And there's fundamental things that we can still learn. And as Hugo says, you know, we can ask people questions, we can understand their psychology through them telling us or us observing them from the outside, but now looking into their brains, looking into their neural systems as at work, that opens up completely new possibilities in terms of the kind of, the kind of refinement of things that we can do. So it's not necessarily that everything is going to be completely kind of redone and we're going to go, we had it all wrong. In some cases that's absolutely true, but in other cases it's getting a more fine grained understanding of kind of really understanding subtleties and subtle differences. Differences are obviously something that are really, really relevant. Hugo was touching on inclusive spaces. And I think what can now really start doing is thinking about humans in their many different facets. So not thinking about, you know, one standardised human, but really thinking about how can we do good for the many. Right. How can we make spaces that include everyone in one form or other? That's a really difficult problem. So obviously the ambition is to address this. I doubt we'll solve it conclusively, which is one of the reasons why the ambition for the centre is also to go out into the world and really collaborate with researchers, with practitioners, with people who are in a variety of different places around the world. So it's not just us at ucl, but that we're really making a collaborative hub at ucl, together with rise, the research institutes of Sweden, who we collaborate with, and Isabelle sits across both of these, institutions. Finally, I also want to say one of the ambitions that we have is not just for us to do this work, but also to pass knowledge on. Hugo was mentioning education as in the spaces that we educate in, whether they are kindergartens, primary schools or indeed universities. But it's also the knowledge that we are now creating in a sense. How do we train the next generation of architects? How do we train the next generation of cognitive scientists? How do we train the next generation of designers in a broader sense? So education is also really, really key for what we want to do at the centre. So lots of impact, lots of different things that we want to do. Yes, we're ambitious and I think we're all excited moving forward.

Jade: It sounds amazing and I wondered if you could say a little about the kind of nuts and bolts about how that centre works. You spoke about the collaboration with RISE and yeah, this idea about it being a kind of collaborative hub, but it would be great to hear More about that?

Fiona Zisch: Yeah, I mean, I guess it's early days for the centre in a way. You know, we're young, but we have formed this collaboration not just at ucl, between different faculties, which is also quite exciting for built environment and brain sciences, also including the engineering faculty, to kind of all come together and think how do we bring together researchers

00:10:00

Fiona Zisch: that are interested in different aspects of built environment and brain science that have got a lot of experience already? Because at ucl we've been doing this kind of work for quite a while across the different departments, different faculties and to kind of start bringing together and kind of creating that platform that allows people to collaborate, but also as I said, working together with rise. So that's then across different types of institutions, kind of different countries. I think that that's really important that we're not just doing this based here in the uk, but also together with a European partner. And then thinking about the many, many academic collaborations that we all have that we've set up that are kind of dynamic and they change and shift over time. So if that's kind of starting to answer your question, but it really is kind of developing in an organic way, kind of a network of collaborations that we already have, but expanding it further.

Jade: Isabelle, how does this work relate to UCL's grand challenge of mental health and well being?

Isabelle Sjövall: I think, I mean we spend the majority of our lives in the built environment, so we have a significant exposure every day. And in my opinion, I think this field has not been explored enough in research. It's difficult. Of course. You have so many factors. and even though we see like you have studies looking at for example how urban spaces would affect mental health, and you can see studies on green space or blue space and things like that, how that could also be like a positive impact and to build resilience, we don't know in much detail, how we can design better and make more conscious choices, for future environments. So this is very exciting. I think the potential of what we can do with this in the.

Jade: Future, that's really interesting. So it's sort of moving beyond those currently understood ideas about space and design, I guess. Okay. And then a kind of question to all of you really, so what do you see as the biggest opportunities and the biggest challenges when it comes to working across disciplines like neuroscience, architecture and design? It'd be very interesting to kind of get each of your takes on that.

Isabelle Sjövall: if I can add another dimension, between also academia and industry that's another dimension that's very interesting, but it's also, sometimes challenging.

Jade: Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, It'd be brilliant to expand on that. So perhaps if you could tell us a bit more, Isabel, to start us off on your, experiences of that.

Fiona Zisch: Okay.

Isabelle Sjövall: well, I think, I mean, there's a joint purpose. I think everyone agrees that everyone wants to try to make the world a better place in different ways. But I think also, in terms of how academia and how industry works, you usually have different approaches how to do that. so this is very exciting times also, with the potential how we can collaborate better, to make things work. But it's different timescales and different ways of doing things. But that's also where the potential, lies. So I have great optimism, in this field that we can, do something great together.

Jade: That's brilliant. And, Hugo, to hand over the same question to you, please.

Hugo Spiers : Yeah, I'll echo what Isabelle said about working with industry. I think if we just took this topic of architecture, neuroscience and design and kept it in a purely grant funded Blue Skies, let's just dream scenario, what impact would we have on the world? It would be less if we did that than if we work with industry, because industry is going to implement those issues. And indeed, you could spend years working on Blue Skies and find there's some flaw in what you were dreaming about, that no one's going to implement these ideas you have. So I think, I think this is a topic where you really do need to be linked into industry to make sure what you're working on is going to have real world impact. There's no question. and it's exciting and working from industry brings with it challenges as we'll discuss, but insights that are not something you can kind of see from just reading the literature or running experiments in a lab. You need to be connected into what's driving, you know, what's happening in the real estate sector. How is educational design changing? You know, you need to be linked into that. And these are thriving industry communities full of ambition and excitement if you tap into the right sections of it. So there's a lot of potential there. I can see. a lot of these sectors we've discussed, I think, are waiting to kind of, you know, use some of the insights we can create. I think that that's easy to say. And the challenges are big. Right. And Isabel alluded to that by the time scales, some experiments I've run can take years, you know, and if you Go from an idea through six years later you might have the final polished published paper. that wouldn't be unusual for some of these areas. And there's no way industry want to work at that speed. and if you do in some research, have to work on a sort of three month basis, it's quite hard to get the kind of rigour and power that you want. And so you have to kind of do both. You have to do sprints, you have to do engage in longer haul. And so that is one of our ambitions is to achieve that here, is

00:15:00

Hugo Spiers : to allow both to occur. so I think there's a lot of opportunity. I think it's also, we talked about industry, but I think generally, academically we don't know that much. Still, I think about how the environment, broadly the built environment, affects brains. Surprising, surprisingly, but also not surprisingly because it's not the kind of stimuli you can put in the lab very easily. You can study how people react to sounds or particular visual stimuli, or you know, maybe you can have people navigate small environments. But how does a, how does working for eight hours a day in a, in a difficult, loud environment affect you? You know, it's hard to study these things. So I think, I think we're also on the cusp of that. And again, as I said, technology is changing. So the capacity to put sensors into environments, is a big, a big feature. Plus the kind of capacity to analyse data that keeps growing year on year. And obviously AI is going to come up in this discussion. And part of the answer, the story of how does this all link to AI? I think is related to the fact that, you're going to have to analyse a lot of complex data that has patterns in it that humans just cannot see by eye. And we need to harness the power of AI technologies to both support that detection and that discovery. But also undoubtedly it's feeding into the design world as to why, allowing people to think, you know, come up with new ways of thinking and doing that didn't used to be to exist. But maybe my colleagues can discuss whether our jobs will disappear because of AI. Perennial, perennial question. But I don't think it's going to happen in this sector anytime soon.

Fiona Zisch: But I'd agree with that. I don't think AI is going to replace us in any shape or form. I think we still have ways to figure out how we might bring AI into what we do in. It's not a similar way, but I think that there's kind of a relevance of that. Also in terms of the question of how do people from different backgrounds, in terms of different disciplines, different ways of thinking about things, approaching, problems, approaching challenges, trying to understand things and then implement them, these different ways of thinking and doing, bringing those together, I think maybe AI is just kind of one additional thing that we can bring into the equation. Because I think it's important also to add that it's one thing to kind of do research to try and understand something and kind of go, right now we understand a little bit more about how people say in a work environment, kind of conduct certain tasks based on light levels or the sound environment that they're in. But if you then go, well, what do we do with that? How do we bring that into design process in order to really kind of improve the spaces that people are now working in? That's not a trivial question because it's not a kind of a simple handover of, you know, here are the takeaways and then I, or we as a group of people who have produced this knowledge, just walk away and designers are tasked to then implement. I think it's an ongoing thing and these things kind of evolve hand in hand and there can be ongoing iteration because as soon as these things are then put into practise, we can also start learning further from that. So I think it's really important to kind of understand all of this on a continuum, but also understand that it's really important to understand understanding in a way because often knowledge is only half as helpful or useful if you don't know how it was produced, if you don't understand how certain insights were gained. And I think that's something that applies both in terms of the collaboration across disciplines, but it also applies obviously if we make the kind of connection between industry and academia, industry and kind of other sectors that we might collaborate with, because obviously we have the public sector and we have kind of, you know, the cultural sector for example, that we're working with. Again, different to kind of complete industry. So I think it is really about close knit collaboration and kind of really understanding how the entire network kind of operates rather than just seeing things in kind of in a siloed way. So you really need to understand the kind of bigger picture and how lots of different puzzle pieces fit together and evolve together in a way.

Isabelle Sjövall: Yeah, I think the translation is so key in this, to help to translate the research into practical, solutions as well, because that's hard. Ah, it's a work that needs to be done and it needs to be crafted and thought about many, many times. So I think also in terms of collaboration, we need better collaborations and also across disciplines, in order to do that.

Jade: That's really interesting. And it sounds kind of like these things are quite dialogic in how they work together or, I don't know, like, kind of informing each other, particularly that work between industry and academia and the different timescales. I wonder if there's something about. Fiona, you were speaking about this idea of, like, needing to understand how knowledge is produced, not just knowing the knowledge, if that makes sense. is that something that's challenging, working across disciplines? And if so, how do you kind of manage

00:20:00

Jade: that?

Fiona Zisch: I think it can be. I mean, obviously, I mean, we all come from different backgrounds and even within that, it's not kind of closely defined. You know, Isabelle has done a variety of different things across her career and integrates an awful lot of different things. You know, I started as an architect and I still am an architect. I don't practise anymore, but I teach, and do research in architecture. But I've been working also mainly with Hugo and a few other colleagues at, UCL in the brain sciences now for about 10 years, actually 12 years, come to think of it. So for quite a long time. And Hugo, as much as he resists it, I think he does have a pretty strong design background at this point. So maybe, maybe it's time to kind of also embrace that a little bit more. But I think it can be challenging. You know, it's. Especially if you've been trained in one field and you can really understand that. I won't go as far as saying undo because we don't want to undo because we're trying to integrate and bring together, but it's to kind of loosen up in certain ways and let new ways of doing things and of seeing things come in. That can be quite challenging at times because it kind of questions the way that you kind of understood the world, even in a way, the world that you inhabit. And it's challenging, but it's also really enjoyable. I think it can be intensely fun if you're up for that experiment and up for learning and constantly learning and evolving, because it's not done, at any one point. I think, you know, that's one of the hopes that we also have for the Centre, that it's in any kind of. In every sense of the word. It's also a place for learning. You know, we're learning things about the world, we're learning things about how we do things. In the world. But we're also kind of learning how we might learn. At risk of sounding a bit strange there, but so challenging. Yes, but also really rewarding. I think otherwise, especially the three of us, we wouldn't have been doing for this long if we didn't also enjoy it.

Isabelle Sjövall: I think it's also about knowledge, sharing actually. I mean if you, because usually you're in your discipline or you're in your field of work and you have that sort of hat on, but if you can also try to understand better where, you know, if you're, if you sit with industry, or industry, sit with researchers, for example, you're trying to understand in a better way where they come from and what challenges they have. It's usually quite good conversations. So I think the more knowledge we can share with one another, the better as well. And that's also how we can solve problems together.

Jade: That's brilliant. Thank you. Okay, so then my last sort of question surrounding that then would be, how could people find out more about the work of the Centre?

Fiona Zisch: I think it's a big question and there's many different answers. And maybe, you know, if we go back to the question of timescales, different ways, you know, publications are an obvious one, but they take longer to produce. we are in a world of social media, so of course social media will contribute. We have the good fortune of being linked into institutions like UCL and like Rise that have their own media outlets.

Jade: Finally, a question to you all to draw us to a close, what do you see as the biggest opportunities, and the biggest challenges, when it comes to working across disciplines like neuroscience, architecture, and design?

Hugo Spiers : So definitely through our institutions there's a project we've run as a team so that involved Fiona and I co led it. But Isabel has designed part of the research in there with us. And the research institutes of Sweden have then backed. There's a whole involvement from Rise and that. And this is this Hundred Minds in Motion project. Fiona's title. She came up with the project based on Barbara Tversky's book. The idea for that project was, you know, design of art galleries, transport systems, public spaces could often involve, you know, like different rooms and having to find your way and move around. You take an art gallery, people have to find their way around it.

Isabelle Sjövall: Or.

Hugo Spiers : I was in the London Underground this morning. You're constantly moving between places. And those places we explore, we have to navigate them, find people and ultimately have to get out of them. We might have to evacuate sometimes. And that research project was about, with the current technology we now have, can we start to study that at scale in a new way that's never been done before? So the idea was to put 100 minds in motion to bring 100 people into a designed large gallery space that we had constructed from scratch, which didn't exist before, put it up over a couple of days and then take it down again. and the core idea was that this would be a gallery that our team would build in the People Environment Activity Research Laboratory of UCL Pearl, run by Nick Tyler, in the Civil Engineering Department of ucl, so the Faculty of Engineering Sciences. So a real jewel in the crown of what UCL can do globally. Pearl is an absolutely amazing facility. 4000 square metres of modifiable space and we used a fraction of it to create an entire art gallery with 12 rooms. But crucially, with that project, we had cameras overlaid over the whole space. Everyone going in there had an ultra wideband tracker on them and a whole

00:25:00

Hugo Spiers : range of people were censored up with EEG or eye tracking or GS are like recording of their skin conductance, or cameras roving around the space. So we were really censoring up the environment. And the excitement of that project was we were able to look at those things exploring, navigating, evacuating space, finding people. We were able to transform the space, you know, knock through whole walls or knock almost all the walls out and see how that changed the effect on people. But for me, the crucial thing with that study was, you know, building up a survey which Isabelle provided input to, about the questions we would ask people about their background. Who are they? They're not all the same. Some people have grown up in London, some in Hong Kong. Some people are young, some are old, some are male or female, some people are neurodiverse. There's a whole range of backgrounds, people come in, and personality. Do people like being in crowds? So we had that as a factor going into the experiment. And finally we also asked people how they felt. So you've got all this data from people tracked in a space, but did they feel happy about it? Did they feel stressed? How did they feel? And that has not been done as far as we're aware, for this kind of crowd like study. So you've got all the ethical. And the crucial thing for us is the reproducibility. It's inside a facility, it's not King's Cross, it's not at Wembley Stadium. It's something we can absolutely, just like, you know, at cern, you can rerun collide atoms. We can rerun and collide humans in a space again. and it wouldn't be possible except through this Collaboration at UCL between the architecture department, so Fiona is the co lead but also we have colleagues in the architecture department, Steven Gauge and Sean Hannah, and the brain sciences I have other colleagues, but in engineering we have Nick Tyler and Tao Chang as an analysis expert in tracking movement M tracking data. So. So her entire lab have been heavily involved. And we've crucially going back to the story of involved industry partners and the design and then we've been very lucky to get support for funding staff to do analysis. So it's a great kind of story. I may pass over Fiona, for comments and Isabelle, who is involved in the kind of design of the surveys and thinking about it too, to comment on what their reflections are. But I'm very proud of what we did because there's nothing like it. I can't point to other studies where they've tested 100 people walking in space.

Fiona Zisch: Yeah, I think it's. Hugo's already mentioned quite a few things there. Maybe just to pick up on the fact that we can redo this and we can set up the same context again, but then we can change some of the things that we might have done. So spatially we could start playing around with things. We can alter light levels and say, what might that do? We can now create a different sound environment and say, well, if the gallery effectively stays the same but it's a different sound environment, or if we change the colours of the walls, what might that do? But also one of the things is we've obviously done this with 100, I think it was just slightly above 100, participants. But if we now go in and we say, well, it's a day where nobody's interested in the art gallery, it's one person and they're moving around there on their own, how does that change their navigation behaviour? How does that change their evacuation behaviour? At the end of the experiment, we ran an evacuation and we were surprised to find that, you know, some people, they followed the instructions and others went, I'm not going to do that. I've been told to go to the closest exit, but I'm going to go to the one that's furthest away. Is that because they were following another person who was doing that? They were getting confused in the moment? We don't know. We can look into it. If it's just me in the gallery, I might behave very differently in that scenario. If I'm suddenly in a group of three or four and these are my best friends and, you know, there's no one else in the gallery. Amazing. We have the gallery to ourselves. Are we going to navigate in a different way? Are we going to socially interact in a different way, Ask each other questions, talk to each other in a different way? And I think that that's all relevant in terms of what we're doing, what we're interested in in terms of improving built environment and then also transferring that knowledge possibly into other scenarios. That transport hub, you know, that school environment that we were mentioning beforehand. But also it allows us to link what we're doing here to existing studies of navigation, behaviour of social interaction in space so that we can really kind of base this on an awful lot of knowledge that does exist and say we know individuals behave like this because scientific studies have been run often in virtual reality, sometimes in physical spaces. But now if we relate that one person, their behaviour to 100 people at the same time, 20 people at the same time, then we can really start looking at spaces in the way that they're used in the everyday because it fluctuates. Every environment is not always exactly the same in terms of the amount of people that inhabit it, the different kind of environmental qualities that the environment might be under at that time. So we can look at context at a much, much deeper level.

Hugo Spiers : Amazing.

Jade: M that's really fascinating that thought

00:30:00

Jade: about how these sort of small changes in everyday spaces can really impact how people are moving within them and approaching them. And Yeah. Isabelle, is there anything that you would like to add on that?

Isabelle Sjövall: yeah, I think also the technology, I mean it's it's very exciting times in terms of technology. with mobile brain imaging and you know you can have biomarkers with you know, wearables and eye tracking and I think it gains a lot of new insights as in combination with the other like the survey questions, and things like that where you ask the participants about their feelings or experiences. So I think it's very ah, exciting times.

Jade: Yeah, it really does go back to that first question about why is this the right time to be exploring these aspects of neuro architecture and design and bringing those things together? Great. So how  might people find out more about your work?

Hugo Spiers : People can visit the Hundred Minds in Motion project page which is hosted by the Bar the School of Architecture. but there's also LinkedIn accounts that we run that people could find out and follow. So there's number of ways in future there'll be more coming for sure.

Jade: That's brilliant. Thank you. Thank you all for joining me today. It's been really fascinating hearing more about the Centre and the work that's planned. You've been listening to Disruptive Voices. This episode was presented by me, Jade Hunter, produced by Destination Creative and edited by Annabelle Buckland at Decibel Creative. If you'd like to hear more of these fascinating discussions from Disruptive Voices, make sure you're subscribed to this podcast so you don't miss future episodes. Come and discover more online and keep up with the latest Grand Challenges, news, events and research. Just Google UCL Grand Challenges.