Panos Mavros

Télécom ParisTech · Social and Economic Sciences (SES)

This paper reports on an online study to investigate the interaction between the environment typology, and crowdedness with aesthetic perceptions of the environment.

Although it may seem intuitive that people prefer spaces that are occupied to some extent and at other times are concerned by overcrowding, the tipping points at which a space becomes too empty or too crowded are difficult to define. In architecture and planning, new computational approaches such as space syntax and spatial network analysis allow d...

Environmental psychologists have established multiple psychological benefits of interaction with natural, compared to urban, environments on emotion, cognition, and attention. Yet, given the increasing urbanisation worldwide, it is equally important to understand how differences within different urban environments influence human psychological expe...

The structure mapping task is a simple method to test people's mental representations of spatial relationships, and has recently been particularly useful in the study of volumetric spatial cognition such as the spatial memory for locations in multilevel buildings. However, there does not exist a standardised method to analyse such data and structur...

In many everyday situations, two or more people navigate collaboratively but their spatial knowledge does not necessarily overlap. However, most research to date, has investigated social wayfinding under either 1-sided or fully shared spatial information. Here, we present the pilot experiment of a novel, computerised, non-verbal experimental paradi...

Finding the optimal tour that visits a series of locations sequentially, such as going for errands, is an everyday task formally known as the travelling salesperson problem (TSP). In this article we focus on the understudied type of multilevel or M-TSP, which take place in a multilevel environment, like a building. In a TSP, the number of alternati...

In this article, we present the rationale, development and preliminary evaluation of a novel set of materials to encourage and improve the consideration of users and their needs during the process of architectural design. Our focus is specifically on two areas: user-centred design principles and spatial cognition research. To this end, we developed...

Spatial cognition is fundamental to the behaviour and activity of humans in urban space. Humans perceive their environments with systematic biases and errors, and act upon these perceptions, which in turn form urban patterns of activity. These perceptions are influenced by a multitude of factors, many of them relating to the static urban form. Yet...

Immersive virtual reality (VR) technology has become a popular method for fundamental and applied spatial cognition research. One challenge researchers face is emulating walking in a large-scale virtual space although the user is in fact in a small physical space. To address this, a variety of movement interfaces in VR have been proposed, from trad...

Unlike most wayfinding experiments focusing on overall task performance, the present study zooms in on local decision-making in complex decision areas within a large-scale multi-level shopping mall. Participants are taken to a decision area, provided with a destination description and asked to navigate towards that destination. They are stopped upo...

While virtual reality (VR) is increasingly being used for behavioral studies and pre-occupancy evaluations, the correspondence of wayfinding behavior between real and virtual environments is yet understudied. In this chapter, we report a post- and pre-occupancy evaluation that compares wayfinding behavior in a real, existing building to three virtu...

Neurourbanism looks to understand the relationship between urban environments and mental well-being and is well placed to assess the role of these environments on the urbanised and ageing global population. This study builds on research using mobile electroencephalography (EEG) to understand the impact of urban environments (busy, quiet and green u...

Link to thesis: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10071602/ This doctoral thesis is concerned with two primary research questions: first, how does the subjective and emotional experience of urban environment influence the process of pedestrian movement and, second, how to systematically capture the emotional experience of active outdoor walking by harnes...

Interview with Alexander D'Hooghe, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at MIT DUSP and founding partner of the Organization for Permanent Modernity.

Please note that the legend to Fig. 1 has been modified since this article was originally published, and also that in Tables 2, 3 and 4, R[2] was corrected to (the now correct) R squared.

This research directly assesses older people’s neural activation in response to a changing urban environment while walking, as measured by electroencephalography (EEG). The study builds on previous research that shows changes in cortical activity while moving through different urban settings. The current study extends this methodology to explore pr...

Metaphorically, altruistic acts, such as monetary donations, are said to be driven by the heart, whereas sound financial investments are guided by reason, embodied by the head. In a unique experiment, we tested the effects of these bodily metaphors using biofeedback and an incentivized economic decision-making paradigm. Participants played a repeat...

In this paper, we present how mobile electroencephalography, or mobile EEG, is becoming a relevant tool of urban studies, including among others, spatial cognition, architecture, urban design and planning. Mobile EEG is a research methodology that requires tightly controlled experiments and complicated analytical tools, but it is increasingly used...

Charity badges and empathy (awareness) ribbons are common tokens of support for charities and other worthy causes. In this paper we revisit the concept of smart badges with the aim of developing digital equivalents of the charity badge/empathy ribbon. We describe the design of prototype low--cost digital empathy badges based around infra-red transc...

This paper will explore questions of agency, control and interaction and the embodied nature of musical performance in relation to the use of human-computer interaction (HCI), through the experimental work Clasp Together (beta) [1] for small ensemble and live electronics by J. Harry Whalley. This practice-led research is situated at the intersectio...

Whilst empathy is considered an essential component of what it means to be human, it is frequently absent as a design objective when creating modern communication systems. This paper presents an approach to designing for, as opposed to with, empathy using the example of two design interventions to create embodied rituals reflecting prayers and worr...

Whilst empathy is considered an essential component of what makes us human, it is arguably absent as a specific design element when creating modern communications. As such, this paper presents an approach to designing for empathy. We consider how design interventions related to a personal ritual within a church community may be extended and augment...

An oft-cited criticism of our increasingly online world is that text based communications still dominate, offering limited opportunity for the development of empathy between users and possibly encouraging more critical and confrontational interactions. Whilst there are a wide range of design methods that enable designers to develop empathy for the...

Background Researchers in environmental psychology, health studies and urban design are interested in the relationship between the environment, behaviour settings and emotions. In particular, happiness, or the presence of positive emotional mindsets, broadens an individual's thought-action repertoire with positive benefits to physical and intellect...

Background Researchers in environmental psychology have consistently shown the restorative potential of natural – over urban-settings using video/photographic experiments in laboratory settings applying subjectively rated scales. But few studies have employed objective indicators of emotional response. This study investigates the use of electroence...

This paper discusses the role of emotions in place making. Recent developments in Brain Computer Interaction have expanded the field of EEG1 beyond the limits of neuroscience. The possibility to use EEG data to elicit the emotional state of the subject (excitement, concentration, negative feelings) opens a new field of research in various disciplin...