Promoting well-being through architecture design and wearable technology (S1E7)
Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the day, bombarded by information from your surroundings and devices, anxious about the future, and unable to relax or catch your breath? You're not alone, and there are reasons for these feelings.
Technology and our social environments, as well as their layout, colours, and forms, all emit energy frequencies that can affect our mood positively or negatively, hindering our social well-being. So, how can we promote better health and well-being and recalibrate our bodies? Could technology also help us find our zen?
In this Season 1 Episode 7 of The Art in STEAM podcast, we explore the intersection of circadian rhythms, photobiology, contributing to a healthy and productive lifestyle and how the design of our living and working spaces can affect our mental and physical well-being.
We are joined by Maroula Zacharias and Katarina Richter-Lunn — both working at the intersection of design, science and technology
Listen to the full episode on Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Podcasts.
[Katarina Richter-Lunn] Let’s dig deeper into what the meat of our work and research is. How does Photobiology research impact the design of artificial lighting systems in buildings? How do circadian rhythms affect human health? And what experiments are you conducting to study this?
[Maroula Zacharias] Photobiology is a very rich and truly interdisciplinary field that, in general, studies the effect of light on all sorts of biological processes. Yes, that does extend to the built environment and the way that we inhabit the built environment. To answer the question of how it affects our circadian rhythms. Because we will see it's primarily about that. But it really goes beyond that. We have to think of photobiology as an umbrella, a big umbrella that affects from our circadian rhythm to the photosynthetic process of plants to our vision to bioluminescence in living organisms to, basically, everything. So, the built environment is, for humans, a big field of effect for biology, but for nature, it’s just a small part. So, I hope that was not a huge intro to what it actually does, how it actually affects our circadian rhythm within the built environment, which it does to a large extent. As Nour mentioned in her introduction, humans are an adaptive species.
So, before we got introduced to the context of the interior, where we have artificial light, changing our biological clock, our bodies were attuned to work, live and hunt outside during the morning hours, and then rest. And that had a cycle. In our early cycle, that would change very little from season to season because humans are adaptive creatures, and so on. So, it really has to do with the time of the day. When we think about Photobiology and the built environment, our mind goes directly to sleep. But it's not really sleep because if we think of how sleep affects our lives, our hormones, our physiology, our mood, which gets back to what you, Katarina, are working on. The answer is: Photobiology is in every activity and every aspect of our daily life, even when we are sleeping. The main principle through which Photobiology affects us in the built environment is that our eyes perceive light through our vision, but also not through our vision, but through our cells that are placed onto our retina. So even when we're sleeping, light affects us, and this is a not-so-well-known truth. In my work, I'm trying to bring that principle into a concept that can be applied to buildings in ways that currently are not explored. The main principle through which Photobiology affects us, and that applies everywhere, but especially in the built environment, is through the content of light, the wavelengths of light that touch our retina. So what we see is the photopic light, but what actually affects our circadian rhythm is the melanotic content of light, and that, of course, works into a ratio. Where this ratio is higher, we tend to be more alert. When this ratio lowers, we tend to relax. This is where I will stop with the technicalities and say that everything that we place into the built environment affects that ratio. The materials on our walls, the posters on our walls, the lamps that we choose to put into our fixtures. They all count heavily into that content of light, this M over P, Melanotic over Photopic content. I focus my research on this specific aspect of the built environment.
You're also researching health through different mediums. Your work is so interesting because it considers other factors in this concept of health. So, how do you define how do you examine health? How do wearables help you understand the built environment’s contribution towards human health and, in particular, mental health?
[KRL] Yeah, Maroula, our work has so much overlap because we're really considering all of these kinds of minute elements of our surroundings and other environments that contribute and impact things that perhaps people don't consider or perceive on a day-to-day basis. And when I use wearables in my research, my work, I use them in two different ways: one, as a metric to collect data and to understand some of these psychophysiological metrics by which I mean subtle things like your heart rate, your skin temperature, perhaps even your electrodermal activity, which is your sweat sensors, and all of these very small cues that essentially are connected to our nervous system gives us today the indication of a certain level of emotional state of well-being, both on the cognitive side as well as the physical side.
So, I rely heavily on wearable and wearable technology in my research in order to give me information and this insight into a subconscious self that often we go through our lives, we're not continuously cognizant of stress even and, and then I use wearables on the other side, on the output side as well. Wearables are a really great tool to test different types of mediated responses very quickly, because they have the benefit that they're on the body, they're close to close to the skin. You can have an immediate response to calm someone down with vibration, haptics, pressure, heat, or even sometimes mimicking heart rate patterns that your body will then subconsciously start to mimic as well if you're looking to calm someone down, or on the opposite side if you’re looking to wake someone up and get them moving with haptic feedback and vibrations. I use the technology of wearables both on the front end to collect my data, but also on the output end to mediate a response. And today, when I'm transitioning my research more into the built environment, I rely now more on wearables for this data acquisition part, where I'm collecting a large range of physiological metrics to understand a person's current state of well-being. And specifically, I focus on anxiety and stress. Then, I'm translating those into more tangible things that are the materials of your wall or the space, the scale and geometry of the spaces that you're in, for example, so very built environment and more architectural features.
[MZ] Does that process involve huge challenges, especially the integration of input and output in your wearables?
[KRL] I mean, absolutely. I think the biggest challenge, especially just working with humans, in general… I mean, both of us have the human being at the centre of our work, and I think the biggest challenge is that every single person is different. And so, when you collect data from one person to the next, you can't assume pretty much anything to be the same. So, every single person has to come with a consideration of baseline. I'm also understanding where they are at this point in time in terms of their mental health, in contrast to maybe last week or two weeks ago, so there's a lot of consideration to be done. And it does make for much more challenging research parameters. But I think if we don't take on the challenge of putting the human at the centre of design, then we won't get very far in terms of designing for people.
