office interior design ottawa

my very first visit to ottawa was partof grade eight school trip when i was 13 years old and i was always trying toremember anything about that trip and the only thing that i can remember andthis is the sad part is that we figured out how to make paper airplanes set themon fire and throw them out the windows of the chateau laurier so and because iwas only 13 they couldn't throw me out hey i got a lot of trouble but i got tostay so not a very auspicious beginning to my relationship with ottawa so i spent afair amount of time here over just the succeeding years i never went back tothe chateau funny that and i have had a lot of fun especially in some of thatthe the pubs on elgin street.

when i was coming into the citytrying to get some kind of a sense of so i stayed in centretown because i wantedto get a sense of the downtown what was going on and so i got into a taxi andtold the the guy where i wanted to go from the airport and he just said ohi said what he said all it's going to be tough to get there is a lot of traffic ok i got up this morning was leaving thehotel i told him where it was coming today and i said how long do you thinkit'll take me to get here and he said oh all a lot of traffic it's going to be toughso from that and also my walking around

in the downtown core and seeing i thinkmore buses perhaps that i've ever seen in one place in my life i got a sensethat one of the the issues for ottawa maybe transportation as it is for anybig and growing city getting people to the places that they want to go and sothat sort of fits with some of the things that i want to talk about i want to talk generally about the mostly the pedestrian experience and iwant to talk about cities in a particular way that relates to my owntraining i'm a psychologist and a neuroscientist by training and so itend to think about people and what they are in ways that may not be the waysthat you

think about people much of the time so iwant to tell you i want to go all the way back to the beginning of socialorganization and people and invite you to reflect on the illustration thatyou're seeing on the slide which is obviously very diagrammatical what'sbeing shown there is the organization of a neolithic settlement so tens ofthousands of years ago when people organize themselves into groups thegroups looked a little bit like this they were typically about a hundred twohundred and fifty people and that turns out to be important all i'll return tothat and what is maybe not very clear from this diagram but nevertheless istrue is that these people these small

groups of people lived basically all of their lives outside andwithin sight of one another so you can see some some structures inthe diagram but those structures weren't actually dwellings people didn'tlive inside dwellings they stored some other stuff their kitchen tools andweapons and so forth inside but not themselves so think about that think about peoplebeing outside exposed to one another within view of one another out knowingeveryone else in the group all of the time

that's where we came from that's in manyways the kinds of brains that we have and elaborate on that point. so clearly acity like ottawa or any large city even a modest sized city is far outstrips thoseearly neolithic villages of a hundred two hundred fifty people so one sort of obvious question i knowthis is something that everyone here probably thinks about some of thetime is you know why do we do it why given that we as a species were borninto living in these small groups why have we collected ourselves intolarger and larger and larger groups well

there are some obvious answers that youcan think of to that question and they always sort of boil down to the samething and that is that the idea that there's strength in numbers thattogether a large number of people can accomplish things that smaller groups ofpeople simply can't and this actually boils down to a niceset of mathematical relationships you can show that there is a more thanlinear increase in all kinds of trends in human development with increasingpopulation size so we have higher income we're more creative we make more stuffwe're more productive out of proportion to the increase in the size of our groupsso there are all kinds of reasons that

you can identify why it's a good thingfor us to live in larger groups but as a psychologist one of the things that i do i thinkpsychologists have a tendency to do this kind of thing we always look for thedark side so and there is one you know what's these are the positivesare living in cities but what's bad about living or at least challengingabout city life and so i'll give you one illustration of an experiment done bypsychologists looking at the effects of urbanicity on the human brain this is you might have heard somethingabout the study it we actually got a

fair bit of media attention it was a study that was done with withgerman participants but it was a canada german collaboration and the idea was tocompare the brains of people who had grown up or lived in different sizes ofdevelopment so a comparison of people who lived in very large cities peoplewho lived in small towns and people who lived in rural settings and the focus ofthe study was on a brain structure called the amygdala so the amygdala isburied inside your temporal lobe it's some sort of pointing to my ownamygdalae. i hope there's one in there pretty sure there is

and we know that it mediates a lot ofour emotional reactions events that take place in the worldthat's kind of a big over simplification of the amygdala but it'lldo for this experiment so what was done in this experiment wasto take these different groups of people who had these different styles of lifeand different kinds of upbringings and to put them in an mri machine a bigmagnet basically that could measure the activity of their amygdala and then tochallenge their amygdala and interesting ways and psychologists are so great ofthinking of the most nefarious things to do to people we really are so in thisexperiment was used with something

called the the montreal stress test a stress imaging test and theway that it works is that while you're in the mri machine anybody here who's had theirhead and one of these tubes knows that it's all by itself not all that great of an experience you're lying on your back youryour heads being measured and you're being presented with mathematicalquestions mental arithmetic questions i think they were two digit multipliersand so the questions are flashed on the screen your job is to answer thequestions while you're doing this and this is the stress part is if all thatwasn't enough

there's a social stress and the socialstress is that you can hear people in the room the experimenters and this is asetup so you think that this is happening by accident but what thepeople are saying as things like oh my god i can't believe he got that onewrong or wow she hasn't gotten a single question right yet so you're getting this false feedbackthat you're completely bombing this test while everything else is going on andthe fascinating thing about the study was that led up a really strong groupeffect so people who lived in big cities their amygdala basically was going crazy

under this kind of social stress andpeople who lived in smaller settings or in the countryside didn't show thosesame kinds of effects so here's a little bit of evidence thatone kind of evidence that living in a city living among large groups of strangers which givenour evolutionary lineages something that's a really strange kind of way ofliving actually changes the way that your brainworks so one of the things well i'll come back to this. i'll carry onwith the story a little bit so again

thinking about this size of theneolithic village 100 to 150 people in these ancient villages and comparingthat to how we live now there is a primatologist whose name is robin dunbarwho did some really interesting comparisons among different species ofmonkeys and what he looked at was the amount of time that that monkeys spendgetting to know one another and the way that monkeys do that primarily is bygrooming one another you've probably seen this if you watched naturedocumentaries or been to the zoo monkeys spend a lot of time picking crapout of each other's coats and that's not just to keep each other clean that's away of getting to know one another of

understanding one another of knowingwhere everyone sits in the pecking order well it's not pecking because it's monkeys but anyway and what dunbar went on tolook at so he observed this and then he went on to look at the relationshipbetween the size of a group of monkeys and the size of their brainsespecially the part of the brain called the neocortex and what he discovered wasthat the larger the group size of monkeys the more developed the brains of thosemonkeys were and he argued that the reason for this had to do with thatgrooming and had to do with that

laborious process of getting to knoweveryone in your troop it's hard to keep track of who's donewhat to whom as we all know from our own lives it'shard it's resource-intensive it takes brain power to keep track of all of that the most fascinating thing that dunbardid i think was to extrapolate from the numbers that he collected on the speciesof monkeys that he studied and said okay consider the human being as a anotherprimate in the monkey line given the size of our brain what size of group should we have andthe number that he came up with was a

number i think the actual number issomething like a hundred and eighteen but we say it's looking a hundred andhundred and fifty so on that number has come to be called dunbar's number anddunbar's argument is that human beings as a species are optimized for living inthat size of group once we exceed that group size then it essentially becomesimpossible given that the power of our brains to do all of thetracking that we need to do to keep track of who's doing what to whom obviously we don't live this way we livein much larger groups in a hundred two hundred fifty

so one of the ways that i think aboutwhat a city is as a neuroscientist is that it sort of up you can think of it as a cognitiveprosthesis what urban design what good are urban design shouldactually do is to find ways to help us to live under conditions thatevolutionarily speaking are completely unnatural we're not built to live in settings thatinclude thousands and thousands sometimes millions and millions ofstrangers and so the way the best way to design a city is to find ways to helppeople to cope with the stresses and

de-stresses that come along with thatkind of living arrangement so what i want to do for the for the restof my talk is to give you three different examples of the ways that ithink that good urban design can mitigate stress and the first one has to dowith nature and i think that you basically have to be have been living ina cave or under a rock or something - not have been exposed to the deluge ofthe least popular media accounts and certainly scientific evidence to suggestthat there is something special about our connection with nature that views ofnature immersion in nature even as it turns out quite modest immersion innature and produce beneficial mental and

physical effects so there's all kinds of evidence forthis the very first study that was done was in the nineteen seventies and it wasa really simple study looking at rates of recovery and surgical patients whohad views of nature from their hospital rooms or not and the finding surprisingly enough was that people whohad such views recovered more quickly than required less pain relief thanpeople who didn't have such views and that was really kind of point alpha andafter that there have just been as i said in an avalanche of studies one ofthe more interesting recent ones was a

study conducted by marc berman. marc berman is a psychologist at the university of chicago but this work wasactually conducted in toronto and what you're looking at on this slide is arepresentation of the amount of tree cover that is available in differentneighborhoods in the city of toronto and what berman was able to show was thatthere is a really nice relationship between a wide range of health variablesand the amount of tree cover in a neighborhood right down to a city blocklevel to the extent that the relationship was so predictive that itwas possible for berman to extrapolate from the data and say plant10 more trees on the boulevards in this

city block and you will increase theaverage lifespan of long-term residents on this block by seven years it was that precise a relationship so inberman's hands and the hands of his team very compelling evidence that ofsomething that i suspect i'm probably sort of bringing coals to newcastle andsaying this but it's bringing very strong evidence that the presence ofnature in cities is absolutely fundamental to it's not just about anaesthetic it's a fundamental feature of a city that both buffers usfrom some of the hard stressful things about living in cities and alsopromotes good health in our laboratory

we've been trying to figure out exactlywhy that is what is it about exposure to to nature that producesthose kinds of effects and i don't have time to go into the fullstory of what we found out but i'll just i'll give you a a little bit of ataste by saying that we think that there's something special about themathematics of images of nature it's something called self-similarityyou probably at some point of heard of things called fractals so the idea of afractal is in this case something that has self similarity of number of scalesso the other classic example of this is what you're looking at here a fernfronds so if you look at the front you

see the same shape in the large frondyou see that shape repeated a smaller scale and the frond let's and so on andso forth all down the line it looks as though we have something in our brainsin a particular part of our brains called the this is a little bit fuzzybut on the left you're looking at a bottom view of a human brain and there'san area called the parahippocampal place area and what we've discovered is thatthe parahippocampal place area actually has a strong preference for these kindsof scenes of nature and it also has an abundance of a particular kind ofreceptor called opiate receptors so think of opiate receptors naturallyoccurring opiates the runner's high

you probably heard of we have endogenoussystems in our body that are designed to make us feel good and there'saccumulating evidence that there is just such a system in our brain that specialized for making us feel goodwhen were presented with with views of nature so i think it's important for us topursue questions about where these kinds of effects are coming from how they'reaffecting our brains because those of you who are involved in the work ofbuilding good cities would probably like to know the answers to questions likehow much how many how often how often

does somebody need to be to have anature exposure to maintain good health how many trees do you need on yourboulevard doesn't make a difference and it turns out that it does whether thosetrees are in public space or in private space those are the kinds of questions that wecan begin to answer with the kind of research that that we're doing soagain so this is a somewhat local view ofnature these areas in cities are terribly important to maintain and topreserve and again they're one of the things that buffer us from the trauma in a way of living among large

groups of strangers so here the second example has to dowith the design of building facades and here's a an interesting building facade in ottawa we began to study this a number of years ago in through anopportunity that came to my lab to work with us an organization called the bmwguggenheim laboratory and the way that this sort of came about was that the bmwguggenheim laboratory was set up as kind of a magnet for people to come and talkabout hear about think about urban issues and at some point early on in theplanning of this laboratory somebody said you know we're calling this alaboratory we really should have an

experiment and somebody who was in theorganizing committee for that laboratory it turns out to have been charlesmontgomery whom i heard came to speak to a couple of years ago said iknow a guy i know a guy who does experiments like this and i got thecall and designed a walking experiment and in this experiment people were ledfrom place to place and they were shown views of different kinds ofstreetscapes and they were asked questions about what they saw the whatyou're seeing here is a map of one of the walks that this is actually thefirst set of walks that we did in new york city we also ran walks in berlinand in mumbai.

here is an example of what an experimentmight have looked like so a group of people carrying smart phones andsmartphones a program to ask them questions and they're also wearing thesedevices on their wrists and these devices are actually able to measure anaspect of the physiology of the people who are taking the walk the measure is something called skinconductance it's basically a measurement of in a way your sweat glands and thereason that we are interested in sweat is because it gives us a little windowinto things like stress where does urban stress come from sowhat were able to do with this measure

is basically to device things that looklike this this is a stress map of the walk in new york city. so what yousee here is a just a google earth map of new york city you can see these bluecontours and the height of the contour basically represents the average arousalvalue of a group of walkers and this experiment and you can see someinteresting things for example you can see places like here for example wherethat arousal value goes really high and what was happening here is that peoplewere walking up a quiet street to a very very busy intersection and you can seehere we have people in a nice community garden in manhattan and you can seethose arousal levels go nice and low so

it gives us a way of measuring people'sarousal as they move through a city you can use it in a number of different wayswe've used it to measure pedestrian stress and the most dramatic example ofthis was an experiment that we did in mumbai which if you've been to mumbai you know that for a pedestrian life isnot easy there that crossing a street involves i've always thought some sortof combination of ballet and parkour to get from one side of the street safelyto another in a city where the cars basically never stop and so when i got there traumatized andculture shocked as i was, spending

hours trying to walk really shortdistances i asked lots of local people you know what's it like to live in acity where it's so hard just to walk from one place to another and they saiduh it's no big deal you just get used to it and so i nodded and said okay welllet's put that to the test so we did some experimentation where we did whatyou're seeing in this photograph which looks sort of innocuous but what's goingon here is that we were leading groups of local mumbaikars too busy trafficcircles and standing them in not in the center of the traffic circle becausethat's sort of well unethical to say the least but in them and asking them toassess for themselves how stressed they

felt and also using our bracelets tomeasure their levels of stressful arousal and what we found there i thinkis one of the most interesting findings in these experiments and that was that that and i think this is important andthis is may be important for a planner to know as well that there is a bigdisconnect between how stressed we might feel how stress we might think we areand what's actually going on in our bodies so when i say i've gotten used tosomething that doesn't necessarily mean that's a good thing

that doesn't mean that all of thenegative health consequences of the stress exposure have gone away it just means really that i know what itfeels like and it feels the same crappy way that it felt last time i had to dosomething like this but in terms of the chronic health effects of those stressexposures they're still going on even if you'reshrugging your shoulders and saying that it's not not a big deal so we did some other experiments withpedestrian stress this is just from one participant walking in one of thebiggest busiest traffic areas of mumbai

a notorious junction called the calli nagar junction and what you're seeing there the contours mean the same thing theheight of the contour is the level of stressful arousal and you can see forexample that it rises to a gigantic peak right here hopefully you can make that out and whatthat's telling us is that in this particular case before someone arrivesat a crossing where they know they have to get across the street their arousal levels are just off thecharts in preparation for this crossing

once things are underway and they'vemapped to strategy which is going to be running between moving cars the arousal levels actually go down alittle bit but in preparation getting ready for that arousal levels aregetting rid of really high so you can think about that on a bunch of differentways you can think on the one hand while the in a way that's a good thing becauseyou don't want somebody sleep walking across a busy intersection you want themto be aroused and alert and aware but on the other hand if they have to do thattoo much of the time as they're walking through a city then over the course oftime that's going to exact a toll on

their bodies and their minds and it'sgoing to lead to chronic disease metabolic disease cardiac disease arange of probably even psychiatric disorders depression can be triggered bychronic exposure to stressors so even though ottawa is not mumbai andand happily from the standpoint of the pedestrian experience few cities arethose kinds of stresses still exist and they still come into play forpedestrians trying to navigate city streets but that's not really even thereason in this first instance why we were measuring people's arousal levelson streets it had more to do with their responses to to urban facades the skinsof buildings the organization of the

streetscape and one of the things thatwe did was to compare what people call a number of different things open versusclosed facades for example permeable vsimpermeable facades the idea basically is a comparison of a facade that haslots of openings lots of things to see lots of doorways windows activity withfacades that don't and what you're seeing here is a couple of examples ofnice open permeable facades the one on the left in new york the one on theright of the berlin and you can find lots of lovely facade is like that aswell here in ottawa and here thecomparison was with closed facades

again it's new york on the left berlinon the right that's a controversial whole foods storethat poor whole foods stores had a lot of negative press coverage sadly because of its closed facade it'sa block long facade with frosted windows there's nothing to see nothing to donothing to look at and the facade on the right in berlin believe it or not is thefacade of a restaurant i stopped a lot of people asking themwhat this building was an interestingly nobody knew nobody had been in there butas you can see it's very much obviously closed and impermeable what wedid in our experiment was to compare

people's responses to those open andclosed are permeable and impermeable facades both again by asking themquestions about their feelings so here this slide is labeled self-assess effectthat's the vertical axis and what it's showing is that there is a tendency forpeople to like high complexity facades more than low complexity facades it's asmall difference but it's measurable and it's statistically significant forwhatever that's worth the more impressive difference came frommeasurements from the bracelets people's levels of physiological arousalwhen actually lower than baseline during exposure to these low complexity closedfacades and went higher than baseline

when exposed to these more complexfacades so higher but not brutally high as in the case of crossing a street inthe calli nagar junction or anything like that so what does this show? itshows that our minds and our bodies are being affected by the streetscapes thatwe walk through in all kinds of interesting ways and these ways to someextent line up with our own assessments of how much we like or don't likeparticular streetscapes. streetscapes that are low in complexity repetitive inour experiments we sometimes call them low in entropy which means basically thesame thing they drop our level of physiological arousal below baseline andthis might sound like a bit of a

contradiction with respect to what i'vejust said but what we know is that it's it's healthy for us to have some kind ofmiddle level we don't want our nervous system to be sent off to sleep we don't want to be bored boredom itturns out can actually also have deleterious health effects boredom can bestressful by itself it can shorten life spans boredom actually over the longterm and enough of it will kill us so we want to hit the kind of middleground and that's very much in line with with traditional thinking inexperimental psychology there was a psychologist named daniel berlynespent his career at the university of

toronto studying responses to complexityin a wide range of different animals everything from cockroaches and rats andmice to human beings and what berlyne said was basically the kind of thingthat i'm showing in urban streetscapes and that is that there's kind of a sweetspot for complexity that in the the mid range of complexity we really thatthis light is actually they both aesthetic judgment so we really like themid-level values the mid-level values produce healthy levels of nervousstimulate the nervous system stimulation but not an overabundance of that kind ofstimulation and it seems to be the case that the same kinds of principles holdfor urban streetscapes as well

so and there are all kinds of greatexamples of for example reorganization of streetscapes to increase theirlevel of complexity towards healthy levels as shown here in the bottom partof the slide these two this is the street corner in melbournebefore and after modification that changed its complexity and changed its attraction to urban street goers here's a slide to point out that it'snot necessarily just the case that the downtown big boring monolithic bankbuildings for example our office buildings are the ones that are guiltyof producing boring sterile streetscapes the same kind of thing can happen inother parts of the city so here's a

suburban street scape this is not ottawawell this is a suburban street scape in in guelph but you can find stuff likethis in in most major cities and although in one sense you might say wellit's open because it has lots of every house has a door and every house haswindows you have the same kind of repeating element over and over and overagain as you walk down the street so in terms of nervous system activity that'sgoing to push things towards the the low side it's going to produce boredom andthat's not very good i'm going to skip over thisbecause i see that i've got about 10 minutes left

i want to make sure i have time to sayeverything. so i'll just tell this was i won't tell you anything i'll just skip over it to this. this is the last thing that iwant to talk about i want to talk about the experience of awe and not in thetotally awesome banal sense of that word i want to talk about the experience ofawe as everyone here has had at some point in your lives so for example the first time that this image was sent around the world and in 1968 it produced an effect soprofound and people that we've given it a name called the overview effect it wasfelt of course most profoundly by the

astronauts who actually saw this earth rise but it was felt byeverybody who saw the image so far as we know and it was a variety of the feelingof awe the same kind of feeling of awe that you might get from watching aviolent thunderstorm from peering over the edge of the grand canyon to lookingat niagara falls looking at a beautiful inky starlit night admiring theaccomplishments of somebody like a stephen hawking all of those things canproduce a feeling of awe and we define our psychologists define or as a statein which we are made aware of the relative enormity of something so we aremade aware of

in contrast of our own smallness and ina way our insignificance and then the other ingredients of awe is that it canbe life changing that it produces epiphany it's of course no accident that many ofthe best examples of awe inspiring architecture are religious architectureand that's quite deliberate the intention is to produce this kind of feeling of awepsychologists have become really interested in awe including us and oneof the things that we've been doing so here's an awe-inspiring vista which isfrom of the city of ottawa we've been doing some experiments atthis point so far only with photographs

of architectural and only interior sofar but we've been trying to do is to figure out what kinds of what kinds ofingredients what constitutes for the built setting what are they like the ingredients toproduce the sensation of psychological awe and so with the help of a grad student .hanagami we've been looking at we've been doing experience we've beenshowing people a large number of images of architectural interiors we've been asking them to

- in some cases participants areclassifying the buildings they're describing the size of the space they'redescribing its ornamentation a large number of different kinds of featuresand then other experiments were asking people to rate the emotions that areelicited by exposure to the photographs and so what we're trying to do with allof this is to try to figure out whether we can boil down to a relatively smallnumber of things what kinds of ingredients in the buildsettings are more likely to produce a feeling of awe so and here's a couple ofimages just to give you the sense from our experiments

this image it's a of a swimming pool inthe hearst castle in california this of all of our images was the one thatproduce the highest ratings of awe in all of our participants and the nextimage is the one that produce the lowest ratings of awe and everybodyalways laughs at this picture so we should probably study humor as well.irony or something so what we've studied so far asarchitectural interiors i have no reason to doubt whatsoeverthat the same kinds of principles will apply to architectural exteriors theskins surfaces the designs of buildings the things that we've learned so farthat the immensity of the structure is

an important ingredient to producing awebut other things are important as well things like the amount of ornamentationthings like evidence that there's a lot of care taken in building the structurethings like interesting things like lighting effects and that we haven'treally gotten to the bottom of yet symmetry of those all of those kinds ofingredients we've discovered are more likely to produce an awe-inspiring vista so far in our hands only interiors butagain i suspect that this will apply to exteriors as well and so why would wecare? why would we care about uh about whetheror not an urban citizen experiences awe

on a regular basis? well it turns out it's in a way it's alittle bit like the nature story it's more than aesthetic it's more than justa cool thing that makes us feel good or makes us identify whether attached toour cities although it can do all of those things but it changes other thingsabout us as well that are more fundamental experiments psychologicalexperiments with awe experiences have shown that when we have recentlyhad an awe experience we change the way that we treat one another we become morepatient we become kinder we're more likely tobehave philanthropically by giving money

to a charity for example we're morelikely to if we spot someone who needs some help or more like to stop and tohelp them so having those all experiences willchange the way that we treat one another which again if you think back to theidea of a city is as a prosthetic device is something that'simportant not only that the experience of awe as it turns out and thisis one of those things that i think is almost too cool to be true but it isexperiencing awe like many of the other things that i've talked about so farwill actually change your physiology so we have these things in our bodiescalled cytokines and here's an

illustration of what cytokines look likethey are elements in our bodies they're quite important they're involved inmounting inflammatory responses so inflammatory responses can actually begood things we want our bodies to respond to injuries by becoming inflamedbut there's such a thing as chronic inflammation and probably everybody inthis room unless you live a very clean healthy lifestyle has some chronicinflammation and that chronic inflammation isproduced by some of these same kinds of cytokines as well interleukins forexample and so the really interestingfinding here is that if you experience

awe the levels of these damaged inducingcytokines actually decreases in your bloodstream so experiencing awe isactually good for you in a different way to the experience of nature but no less a fundamental constraint or should be a fundamental constraint on howcities are built so when you think about i heard this morning about things likeprotected view sheds in ottawa for example and of course ottawa is not the onlycity that invokes rules about what kinds of things can be done to block outthe really nice views that parts of a city and again that's not as it turnsout just an aesthetic that's not just to make a city look nice it's not justabout pleasantness it's about affecting

the way that people treat one another it's about helping us to again come toterms with what we have built for ourselves to live in that contrast withwhat our brains have actually evolved to to cope with and it's fundamentally just as with nature a matter and with facade design for that matter amatter of a matter of public health

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