Concepts

Affect-field

The gravitational configuration of spatiality.

Ambient psychoactive field

To convey an intense event or abrupt situation triggering a transition, alteration or effective influence.

Agent-environment capacitance

An enhanced reception to the body’s capacitive effect within the environment.

Causal patch

Compositional technique to describe the synchronization of multiple effect cues.

Coaction field

The meeting point between perceptual, cognitive, associative and geometric space.

Coefficient of Affordance

The coefficient of affordance is derived from combining Gaston Bachelard’s coefficient of adversity (1942) with James J. Gibson’s affordance (1979) theory, the coefficient of affordance addresses the latent capacity to effect variable modes of relationality through the perceivable possibilities of adaptive interplay between affect agency and field stimulus.

Cognitive-tope classification

Perceptual friction typology: calibrates the performative values of multi-modal feedback including expression accent, physiological instinct, behavioural intuition, cognitive attention and experiential dynamics.

Cognitive-tope composition

Schema Bias: affect order judgement inferring perceptual architecture.

Cognitive-tope mapping

Operationalizes the Cognitive-tope profiling typology into a visual, multi webbed space notation for mapping psychoactive spaces. Cognitive-tope mapping is used to identify perceptual information or ‘attentional’ analysis (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) through ‘integrative observation’ (Schwalbach, 2009), revealing a greater compositional potential for phenomenal organization.

Cognitive-tope ordination

A relational system of measurement concerned with the role of perception in mediating sensory space and the cognised environment.

Cognitive-tope profiling

Spatially localized sensitization practice using biosensor technology that combines ‘situational analysis’ (Clarke, 2005) with empirical data analysis. Explores the ‘conveying of phenomena’ (Hoffman, 1994) through ‘transference recordings’ (P.C. White, 2004) using procedural spatial forensics.

Feedback loop

Situated transactions between agent-environment.

Felt_space

Emergent subspace through the superposition event of agent-environment interference.

Felt_space infrastructure:
hyper vigilant spatiality to valence the visceral dimension

This thesis evolves perception as a hypothesis to reframe architectural praxis negotiated through agent-situation interaction. The research questions the geometric principles of architectural ordination to originate the ‘felt_space infrastructure’, a relational system of measurement concerned with the role of perception in mediating sensory space and the cognised environment. The methodological model for this research fuses perception and environmental stimuli, into a consistent generative process that penetrates the inner essence of space, to reveal the visceral parameter.

These concepts are applied to develop a ‘coefficient of affordance’ typology, ‘hypervigilant’ tool set, and ‘cognitive_tope’ design methodology. Thus, by extending the architectural platform to consider perception
as a design parameter, the thesis interprets the ‘inference schema’ as
 an instructional model to coordinate the acquisition of spatial reality through tensional and counter-tensional feedback dynamics.

Three site-responsive case studies are used to advance the thesis. The first case study is descriptive and develops a typology of situated cognition to extend the ‘granularity’ of perceptual sensitisation (i.e. a fine-grained means of perceiving space). The second project is relational and questions how mapping can coordinate perceptual, cognitive and associative attention, as a ‘multi-webbed vector field’ comprised of attractors and deformations within a viewer-centred gravitational space. The third case study is causal, and demonstrates how a transactional-biased schema can generate, amplify and attenuate perceptual misalignment, thus triggering a visceral niche.

The significance of the research is that it progresses generative perception as an additional variable for spatial practice, and promotes transactional methodologies to gain enhanced modes of spatial acuity to extend the repertoire of architectural practice.

Mobius manifold

Self-intersecting feedback loop converging agent-environment connections through continuous co-evolution.

Multiverse

Multi dimensional subspace framework co-existing within geometric space.

Neural-environment Queue

Highly sensitised nervous system attuned to its environment creating a human singularity through somatosensory amplification.

Niche: co-adaptive

The systemic co-evolution of neural-environmental engagement.

Phenomenological emergence

Perceptual, cognitive and associative dimension physicalised in space and time.

Psychoactive field-space

Dynamical model of space that crosses body/space barrier & infers an extended spatial dimension from the tension between site signature, immersion & interaction, affecting perception, consciousness, cognition & behaviour, that is, phase change through space considered as a conveying medium.

Psychophysical

Perceptual, cognitive and associative feedback in response to physical stimuli.

Reflexive

Denoting a feedback system.

Spatio-taxis

Transitions of cognitive-tope force-field differentials through spatial register (felt-space inertia).

Sub-space

Emergent associative space from hyper vigilant agent-environment induction-interaction distortions.

Superposition

Emergent affect from the coincidence of separate field conditions.