Google creates neuroaesthetic experience for Salone del Mobile

Photo of a man behind a counter with wristbands in a white and steel room — Upon entering, visitors picked up colored wristbands. (Edoardo Delille/Courtesy Google.)

Photo of a dimly lit room with charcoal couches and wooden chairs — Every room also had a unique scent. (Edoardo Delille/Courtesy Google)

Photo of a woman standing behind a counter with a touchpad and wristband — After exiting the rooms, visitors got to check out an overview of their comfort level in each space. (Edoardo Delille/Courtesy Google.)

An axonometric diagram of the rooms showing two areas with black walls, and others in various colors — Visitors to *A Space for Being* walked their way through three unique rooms. (Edoardo Delille/Courtesy Google)

Photo of a room with a blue to peach gradient wall and orange and blue seating — Each room was designed by Google’s Ivy Ross, Muuto’s Christian Grosen, and Reddymade’s Suchi Reddy. (Edoardo Delille/Courtesy Google)

This past week in Milan during Salone del Mobile while designers were showing off their latest furnishings, Google was putting on its own exhibition. Following up on last year’s Softwear exhibition, in which the company teamed up with Li Edelkoort to envision a more comfortable, integrated hardware future, this year the tech giant built out three rooms in the Spazio Maiocchi for a show called A Space for Being.

A Space for Being explored the ways qualitative senses could be understood with quantitative metrics. Google collaborated with Susan Magsamen of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University’s Brain Science Institute to develop a design installation that explored the possibilities of neuroaesthetics, or the brain’s and body’s responses to the aesthetic world.

Neuroaesthetics tries to understand how the brain and body respond to different sensory experiences. (Edoardo Delille/Courtesy Google)

Visitors lined up around the block to be adorned with a wristband that collected biometric data while they explored the rooms’ various furnishings, colors, lights, music, scents, and textiles by Google’s Ivy Ross, Muuto’s Christian Grosen, and Reddymade’s Suchi Reddy.

At the end of their walkthroughs, attendees were given synopses of their bodies’ responses to the various spaces, helping them see in which context they were most at ease. While this kind of data-driven neuroaesthetic approach is still in its nascent stages, one could imagine a future when data-driven design becomes more normal, especially in settings like healthcare. Even for those who might balk at the idea of collecting this kind of information to create something so subjective as an interior, the results show that design has a profound impact on us, our biology, and our wellbeing.

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