Background

This competition is hosted by academic institutions investigating the relationship of architectural design and cognitive processes in human (see Organizers). The contributions of this competition will serve as input to scientific research on design cognition (how do architects design?) and wayfinding cognition (how do building users perceive an environment and how do they navigate through it). The symposium in NYC (see Awards & Benefits) is an event to further strengthen the link between cognition and architecture.

Scientific questions of followup research will include:

• analysis of how designers have addressed circulation and user orientation issues
• relate building usability to computational analysis of environmental properties (including, but not limited to Space Syntax)
• Testing of design solutions in Virtual Reality simulation to evaluate user behavior.
• Potential to analyse plans/design solutions as a case study with controlled materials, to be analysed both from wayfinding perspective and design cognition perspective