L'emergere della mente nella porgettazione architettonica: corpo, cervello e strumenti digitali. Dialoghi con Sarah Robinson, Bob condia e Michael Arbib.

Thanks to conversations I had with Sarah Robinson and Bob Condia, architects, and Michael Arbib, neuroscientist, key authors in the field of research in which architecture and neuroscience hybridize each other, I got to build a multi-voice narrative on the theme of mind in the architectural design process. Through the framework of the extended mind theory and some of its subsequent developments, attention is focused on the design process in relation to the digital tools that constitute one of its integral parts and that professional practice can no longer disregard. Surprisingly, there is a lack of systematic research and consolidated methodologies that consider the mind, during the architectural design process, not occasionally extended but intrinsically extensive, a system of inseparable relationships between cognitive processes, technique, and material culture. In this sense, among the cognitive processes involved in design activity, imagination is considered to be crucial. In fact, its perceptive and multisensorial root and its intrinsic interactivity make the imagination what most blends with the characteristics of the digital model; the consequences of this interaction are still little investigated. As an ability to foreshadow the possible, imagination is the a-historical component of design activity; however, it cannot be separated from the historicity of technical means, systems of representation, and semantic references in a given cultural context. The fragments of conversations reported here insist on the need for specific training in the embodied perception of the space in which we are immersed, useful to keep the imagination effective in its potential to convey data relating to the motor and perceptive sphere into the project. The neurosciences confirm that the imagination has a close relationship with memory: it is a reconstruction from fragments of episodes that are the product of a subjective construction themselves, hence the importance of a targeted construction of spatial sensitivity. The lack of critical sense with which digital tools, from which we are seduced, are now integrated into teaching and the profession has also been highlighted.