Mindfulness + Design

Hi, thank you for having me here today. My name is Liz Swanson and I’m an Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky’s School of Architecture.  For today’s presentation I’d like to share the story of a studio course I recently completed that centered on an exploration of mindfulness and its relationship to design. 

Traditionally, the goal of the course is to introduce the basic elements of architecture and design as a process, with various conceptual themes that guide the assignments.

For this Spring semester, our theme of mindfulness was initiated by my sense —and even shock—at the increasingly dominant presence of smartphones and mobile devices in the classroom.

Deep consciousness of the physical environment and its effects on human experience is essential to the practice of architecture, as is the ability to concentrate for extended periods of time.  The architecture studio has always been a contemplative space that I’ve referred to as a “temple of creativity”:  a zone where students immerse themselves in both the study of existing environments and the  imagination to draw forth architectural works.  Students meet with their instructor for 12 hours a week to develop their ability to break down and synthesize multiple, competing constraints.  Learning to design and build is juggling act that requires one’s undivided attention, as problems increase in complexity over time.

But upon my return of a year’s sabbatical, I was confronted with the ubiquity of cell phones and students’ alarming preoccupation with what I call the ‘virtual elsewhere’: distant, external stimuli accessed only through that little blue screen I found students staring at on campus, during class and always within arms reach.  What struck me most was how public and at times brazen it was:  students focused downward, looking at the phone in their laps, texting during discussions and posting tweets that anyone could read—including their professors. There seemed to me a lack of consciousness on the part of many that ‘classtime’ was not time to text, browse or tweet. 

This sense was corroborated by numerous studies that document the exponential increase of ‘mobile penetration’ with the advent of Twitter, Instagram and thousands of other Apps predicated on entertainment and extroversion. 

Colleagues who felt the same simply said, “take the phones away,’ though this never struck me as progressive or particularly sustainable solution, as putting cellphones in a basket doesn’t necessarily alleviate the need students feel for checking in. In fact, many expressed just the opposite:  they told me that being separated from their devices created anxiety and a sense of lost control:  what if someone needs me and they can’t get through? I realized through our discussions that cellphones are quickly changing the expectations of our relationships, and because so many condense a multitude of utilities onto their phones, their presence makes them seem ever-more essential.

While I have never formally called what I do in my classroom ‘mindfulness,’ I had recently been introduced to the concept and the more I learned, the more I realized its natural overlap with my approach to design:  “Good design requires acting with awareness” and “understanding architectural process in relationship to consciousness” have always been emphasized on my syllabi.  But that Fall, I began to question if the exponential uptick of mobile technology in students’ lives might require a more direct dialogue about tuning in by tuning out—because while ‘virtual elsewhere’ may call on increasingly often, it’s possible we answer at the expense of the here and now which in studio’s case, includes that interior realm of the imagination that we *must* connect with in order to design things deeply.  Mindfulness after all, with its emphasis ‘on purpose,’ poses this issue of choice:  that the ways we connect have meaning and impact.  In mindfulness, I found a new way to explore concepts that I hoped could motivate this consciousness, as well as techniques that I hypothesized could increase my students’ ability to concentrate and engage more fully.

In addition to the usual curriculum I’m required to address, my strategy was to incorporate “Movement and Mindfulness” as a studio theme with three goals in mind:  to explore architectural connections between the body, experience and place; to inspire creative thinking about the design process, and to foster empathy, a critical aspect of architectural practice that calls on the designer visualize space for others.

My other motive, which I made very clear to students, was to discuss mindfulness in order to increase their ability to focus for greater lengths of time. We began the semester by discussing the New York Times’ “Why You Probably Won’t Finish Article” and defining mindfulness as means to achieve intense, sustained concentration.  It was explicit that the practice of yoga and meditation were in service of developing a deep and healthy design process.

Programmatically, the semester was organized around the practice of yoga, meditation, and various exercises designed to increase students’ consciousness of their own process and the world around them.  These activities cycled throughout the week, while projects over the course of the semester also shifted in emphasis: from the analysis of the physical body to an exploration of the non-physical mind.

The first project involved the analysis and interpretation of the body in specific yoga poses. Students were encouraged to choose poses that they themselves could do and develop a sense of the internal forces and full considerations at play. 

Structure, Form, Tension, Compression, Axes of Movement—so many fundamental aspects of building can be found in language of yoga that the practice facilitated a very direct route for talking about architectural elements and material connections.

Many students noted that by feeling the subtlety of interior forces and the shifting of energy in their own body, they were better able to understand architecture as a living system of complex forces in balance.  This is particularly important in contemporary dialogue as the practical and theoretical emphasis of architecture has shifted from a concern for stylistic or visual monumentality to one of sustainability and performance.      

For example, poses that appear symmetrical and static, such a Locust pose, were translated into dynamic, assymetrical objects to express the struggle and difficulty in achieving the stance.  Other projects, such as this interpretation of King Pigeon, sought to express internal tension and stretch felt by the participant.

Additionally, in speaking about yoga, the studio emphasized the relationship between body and mind as an analogy for the design process itself.  When holding a pose with focus, for instance, students experienced that body became more stable; but when distracted, the form more difficult to attain.   Early on, this emerged as a simple, but powerful metaphor: work is easier to achieve when focused.

At the same time I began to introduce a series of exercises that challenged students to pay attention in specific ways.  The first was a game that takes its cues from the language of meditation.  Each student was given a length of string scaled to the number of minutes in class, which was placed on their desk as they drew.  Just as meditation calls on one to pull wandering thoughts back to the breath, the string challenged students to remain aware of their thoughts: each time their attention wandered from their work, they were asked to snip the string proportionately and move back into their drawing.

The exercise introduced the element of time, which corresponded to the second project that asked students to situate their designed object into an earthen site and envision them as habitable space.  The assignment was to create a poetic procession that transitioned the inhabitant from outside to inside space and celebrated the ritual of entry.  The assignment explored the cinematic quality of architecture as a series of spatial moments that frame human experience and unfold over time.  Our discussion of mindfulness then broadened to include aspects of relational connections—that being aware of our design decisions requires an understanding of contexts, which by nature are always in flux.

To support this, a second exercise was introduced.  At the beginning of each class, students were asked to close their eyes in guided visualizations, to envision their space as vividly as possible.  At times, I would ask them to focus on seeing specific elements, while at others I asked them to imagine walking the path in someone else’s shoes: for instance, a mother pushing a stroller or an older man with hearing loss. How could the needs of others inform their design? Were there any aspects of the work that stemmed solely from assumptions based their own frame of reference?

These considerations go well beyond ‘accessibility’ or whether a building meets code, as what I’m asking students to do is visualize the atmosphere and impact of their vision of place—socially, culturally, spiritually, and otherwise.  Through guided visualizations, I encourage students to engage architecture as a series of relationships that create site-specific connections that influence our sense of identity.

The third exercise I incorporated into our semester was called “Ideal Conditions,” a practice of noticing the ordinary.  Whenever the climate or light of the season inspired, students were invited to call “Ideal Conditions” at which point the entire class would move outside to simply observe the conditions of the day.  Both as a group and individually, we would walk the pathways of campus, sometimes to draw or simply notice the color of a winter sky, or how branches droop when heavy with ice to form rooms near the base of a tree.   

By becoming more conscious of the subtlety and rhythms in their surroundings, students began to examine how their work could affect the same kind of liveliness and detail.  I’ll never forget when I asked my students to simply lie down and quietly gaze at the passing clouds—something many of us can remember doing as children—and one’s reaction:  “Wow, I really haven’t taken the time to look at things this way,” as stillness of any kind is rare for most.

Architecturally, I think these activities impacted their work in specific ways. For one, sensations such sound, light, texture and physical touch arose as primary aspects for many of their proposals as ways to express conceptual or poetic ideas.  As one visiting critic observed the “students began to conceive of their architectural work as multisensory experiences rather than static, formal objects.”

And second, it allowed an easy way to discuss issues of scale.  As students took time to slow down and notice the smallest scales of design and construction, their awareness of details and material connections increased.  Whereas most First Year students tend to worry about what something looks like, it became easier after the sessions to discuss how things are made.

For the third and final project, our focus continued to shift toward meditation with the design of a Mindfulness Retreat.  For two class periods, students were led by practitioners at Furnace Mountain Zen Buddhist Retreat where they practiced sitting in silent meditation for 2, then, 3, and eventually 8 minutes at a time, an activity that students described as both difficult and invigorating— for many of the same reasons our cloud-watching had made an impact: the silence allowed a kind of reversal, with background sensations coming to the forefront while thoughts fell away—at least momentarily. 

These sessions also forced an interesting conversation about the relevance and meaning of architecture, as meditation (compared to many activities), doesn’t need a building or any enclosure at all; meditation’s boundaries of interior and exterior space primarily occur at the scale of the body.  So do we need a building at all?  Obviously, within the context of my class, the answer is yes—though meditation emphasized the importance of architecture as act that facilitates human relationships and something, that when done well, recedes in favor of the sensations it amplifies.

Having participated in the practice—and the struggle it presented—many students sought to embody their experience by finding forms that could communicate a personal definition.  For example, as one student wrote, “Meditation is the conscious attempt to reveal and embrace the subtle and evasive capacities of the mind,” which in turn generated an onion-like form of multiple shifting planes; while another student explored the perception of spatial depth through layers of spatial frames.   

And while it’s difficult to quantify the success of architectural projects objectively, the feedback I received from students throughout the semester suggests that the exercises we explored did to a more nuanced understanding of the body, the built environment and the creative process.  Over the course of the semester, almost all shared with me some positive affect that they linked specifically to our mindfulness practice, such as thinking more broadly about the experience of others, more deeply about architectural phenomenon and more consciously about their design process.  Of 14 students I surveyed, more than half felt an increased ability to concentrate for longer periods of time, while several expressed a desire to mitigate relationship with mobile technology.

But perhaps most importantly, mindfulness allowed my students and I to engage in a conversation about the value of being present in our lives as designers—because we live a time where the physical and virtual worlds are evermore linked. The pressure to put everything out there right now, along with the sheer temptation that all that information presents, has unprecedented potential to diminish the value of slow, quiet, personal contemplation.   And yet this is exactly what architects need--for however much we may inhabit the world of our smartphones, at some point, we log off, and look up.