Architectural Form and Affect: A Spatiotemporal Study of Arousal

Abstract: How does the form of our surroundings impact the ways we feel? This paper extends the body of research on the effects that space and light have on emotion by focusing on critical features of architectural form and illumination colors and their spatiotemporal impact on arousal. For that purpose, we solicited a corpus of spatial transitions in video form, lasting over 60 minutes, annotated by three participants in terms of arousal in a time-continuous and unbounded fashion. We process the annotation traces of that corpus in a relative fashion, focusing on the direction of arousal changes (increasing or decreasing) as affected by changes between consecutive rooms. Results show that properties of the form such as curved or complex spaces align highly with increased arousal. The analysis presented in this paper sheds some initial light in the relationship between arousal and core spatiotemporal features of form that is of particular importance for the affect-driven design of architectural spaces.