Immagini mentali in architettura. Tecnologia del progetto nell'epoca della pervasività del digitale.

The process that leads to the prefiguration and potentially build architectural space is complex, requiring the expertise of various professionals and knowledge across multiple disciplines, traditionally aided by specific tools. Today, digital technology for architectural design offers immense capabilities, influencing the design process from its earliest stages. Drawing from the “extended mind” theory (Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Malafouris, 2013), it is essential to examine the architectural design process through the tools used: body, brain, and "active externality" form a network of continuous interactions that lead to brain reconfiguration. Research into the cognitive impacts of digital media on architecture often overlooks its relationship with mental imagery, which we propose should be considered a crucial modeling tool in architectural design (Giachetta et al., 2019). Viewing environmental perception as an embodied experience of atmosphere (Canepa, 2022), we contend that imagination, through multimodal mental imagery, is the cognitive process best suited to infuse these experiential qualities into the design project. Behavioral and neuroscientific studies have shown that mental imagery is a form of perception without the corresponding sensorial stimulus (Nanay, 2018), can enhance and alter perception (Pearson et al., 2008), is closely linked to memory (Arbib, 2021), retains spatial properties for inspection and transformation (Kosslyn, 1983), and allows architects to empathize with the envisioned architectural experience (Pallasmaa, 2014). Given the increasingly blurred line between a designer's mind and their tools, this research presents a theoretical framework to investigate the interaction between digital tools and mental imagery from a philosophical and cognitive perspective, alongside two experimental studies derived from this framework. To demonstrate the impact of tools on the design process, we tasked a group of architecture undergraduates with a simplified design challenge under two conditions: using “2D-3D CAD software” versus “only imagery” (within-subjects design). We assessed the effects through self-report questionnaires, which indicated that the design process is indeed influenced by the tools used, at least from the participants' subjective experiences. In a second study, we aim to determine if architects with different visual cognitive styles, "object" or "spatial" (Blazhenkova & Kozhevnikov, 2009), exhibit different brain activities during a design task that simulated a process guided by BIM software. The experiment was divided into two phases: the first involved the psychological assessment of 30 experienced architects using validated psychometric tools, and the second involved the EEG evaluation of six architects during the design task. The task was designed to simulate a process with predetermined steps and abstract visual stimuli, characteristic of BIM software interaction. The results showed significant differences in cortical activity between two homogeneous groups of architects with object or spatial visual cognitive styles.