Project

Encoding Experience

Towards a Human-Centric Built Environment

Encoding Experience explores the intersection of design, human sciences, and technology with the overarching goal of elevating focus on people’s experience of the built environment. Stemming from initial dinners held in the spring of 2025, this project is an ongoing effort to build a community dedicated to driving future research and development and pushing conversations forward in this vital field.

We use the provocative idea of a “joyprint” as a central question:

If the last decade in AEC design was marked by increasing attention to the “carbon footprint,” could the next decade be about creating a similarly universal, impactful paradigm for evaluating design’s influence on human well-being?

Inaugural Encoding Experience dinner at the Autodesk Technology Center in Boston, April 2025

Key insights from the Encoding Experience conversation in Boston.

Through interdisciplinary dialogue among experts from fields including architecture, neuroscience, public health, engineering, and AI, we’ve identified the following key areas we believe crucial for advancing this preferred future:

    • Fostering Pragmatic Collaboration: Identifying and pursuing key research breakthroughs needed to achieve human-centric design goals by bridging traditional disciplinary silos.
    • The Challenge of Measurement: Defining methods to distil the multi-faceted, complex and arguably subjective nature of experiences into impactful, broad metrics for design guidance.
    • Responsible Data Collection: Exploring how to capture and evaluate data on human experience of spaces effectively, integrating both quantitative and qualitative approaches, while critically addressing issues of data bias, representation, and privacy.
    • The Need for New Tools: Envisioning the development of software tools capable of simulating, assessing, or predicting human responses to space, potentially leveraging advancements in AI.

We will be using this webpage as a hub for related updates and announcements and encourage you to reach out the the researchers below if our objectives resonate.

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