Walter “Stan” Mathis, MD, associate professor of psychiatry, and three Yale colleagues have been awarded a seed grant to develop a tool to help architects explore, predict, and reflect on the potential human impact of their designs.
The project, “Modeling Embodied Perception and Physiology in Generative AI for Architectural Design,” is funded with a grant by AI at Yale, which is leading Yale’s work around artificial intelligence.
The grant seeks to promote innovation and thought leadership around AI, nurture projects with ethical uses of AI to improve the world, and to foster interdisciplinary collaboration at Yale and beyond.
The project by Mathis and colleagues Elihu Rubin, PhD; Wendy Berry Mendes, PhD; and Laure Ségur, M.Arch combines wearable physiological sensors, point-of-view video, and artificial intelligence to study how features of buildings and spaces affect people's bodies and experiences as they move through real-world settings.
The resulting models will power new design tools that can help architects explore, predict, and reflect on the potential human impact of their designs. By connecting measured human experience to generative AI, the project advances a new approach to creating environments that are not only functional and visually compelling, but also responsive to human well-being and experience.
Eventually, the researchers hope to use the tools to better understand how buildings and spaces affect mental health and to help design better mental health treatment facilities.