The car is sick, the ship is sick, and yes, the building is sick.
I often feel motion sicknessfeeling nauseous and dizzy, on winding mountain roads, rough waters and in virtual reality. I feel it in some buildings too.
Wire for sensitive interaction
Our senses work together to translate information from it environmentand in most cases our senses tell us a consistent story. For example, sound-shape association is well-documented in the Buba-Kiki effect, where people tend to associate the rounded sound of “Buba” with its round shape, and the sharp sounds of “Kiki” with its spotted and unsharp shape. The Bubba-Kiki effect is just one example of cross-talk, where information from different senses, such as hearing and vision, is linked in the brain. New research showed that this phenomenon extends to newborn chicks, suggesting that these cross-sectional associations may help certain species interpret their environment from the earliest days of life.
For humans, environments that tap into our crossmodal abilities create connections between inputs from different senses that give us meaning from limited sensory information. For example, color can represent a sense of temperature, where blue represents a cold pool and red a hot tub.
Rich textures can evoke our sense of touch through vision alone, as if we were actually touching the material itself.
The feeling that the world has turned upside down
Our brain struggles when it receives mixed messages. When there is a discrepancy between what one sense communicates and what another sense does, we become confused, which can manifest as unpleasant symptoms.
An extreme example of motion sickness occurs in visitors to Poland Upside down house. Built in 2007 upside down and on a corner attraction was a political statement meant to reflect how communist rule had turned Polish life “upside down”. It will be reported that during the construction, the workers had to take frequent breaks to avoid the consequences of productivity.
While the upside-down house was intentionally designed to unsettle guests as entertainment, some buildings unintentionally have the same effect. Advances in digital technologies have made it possible to create new and inexpensive forms of non-orthogonal structures that lead to new and unexpected perceptual experiences. As quoted from “Sensitive Design for All,” I describe how visitors to the Hamilton Building at the Denver Art Museum reported feeling dizzy in response to the angled interior walls. For me, this sense of dizziness was intense when climbing the main staircase, where every plane in my view was angular. Not only were the walls and ceiling moving and moving apart, but I was moving diagonally as I climbed the stairs.
According to the sensory conflict motion sickness commentsspatial orientation relies on integrated input from three systems: the vestibular (inner ear structures that determine direction), visual (eyes), and proprioceptive (position sense) systems. Together, these systems help us adjust position, move, and maintain a desired direction. The moment I’m on the museum steps, gravity pulls down on the gravel-like crystals in my inner ear, telling my vestibular sensory cells that I’m standing. Meanwhile, visual signals from angular planes indicate that my body is not straight. My brain struggles to make sense of the competing messages and adjust body position, and I feel as if I’m oscillating between both positions, upright and angled. Call it a hangover, this dizzy feeling lasted for hours.
Similar puzzling experiences have been reported by visitors Ray and Maria Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), especially in the conference hall, where the jets of turbulence reportedly disorient one-third of the visitors. Such vertigo not only causes sensory discomfort, but also movement anxiety, potentially increasing the risk of falling from miscalculated movements from opposing sensory cues.
Future spaces may cause side effects
As construction techniques become more advanced to replicate the anti-gravity designs envisioned in virtual worlds, and technology allows us to develop virtual-physical hybrid spaces that cause virtual reality motion sickness, we may be at greater risk of building motion sickness.
The main methods of treatment of motion sickness include medicine and reducing emotional conflicts. Do we create a world in which we need more and better pharmacological interventions, or do we demand less sensitive conflict in our built environment?
For more information on Bouba-Kiki in architecture, check out this is a fun video The question “Can buildings be Bubba or Kiki?”
