Sometimes I accidentally stumble into topics that I don’t realize until later I’ve been revisiting over time without noticing. Today’s post about micro-neighborliness said that “just as the built physical environment can limit or inspire the ways in which we interact with other people, so, too, the built virtual environment” and it turns out, if you’ll allow the phrasing, that I’ve walked through this neighborhood before.
Last month, I wrote a bit about, in the words of Mark Bessoudo, “the effect that the built environment has on our brains”, and while my interest at the time was to talk about the ways in which that effect can be doubled or trebled when one’s brain happens to be an autistic one, I spotted this evening that this earlier post quotes architecture professor Alan Penn’s observation that “empathy depends upon perception”.
We have to see, or possibly to hear, others in order to view things from their point of view. Building a wall constrains who can see whom, and so can constrain the potential for empathic relationships.
Come back, then, to my earlier post today in which I quote Sameer Vasta talking about the need for “inclusion, awareness, empathy, and serendipity” in things like the design of public transit. Emphasis added because there it is again: empathy.
I’d quickly followed up last month on that one post with another because that, I think, was when I first spotted that discussions of the effects upon us of the built physical environment was analogous to discussions of the effects upon us of the built virtual environment, and it wasn’t until much later after today’s post that I’d even remembered that I’d at least circled around these ideas before.
Now I’m sort of hooked on this. Is there any work out there directly connecting, comparing, and constrasting the ways in which we build our physical and virtual environments impact us? Is anyone trying to find lessons in physical successes to apply to our virtual world, and/or vice versa?