Body Conscious Design with Galen Cranz

Today it is my pleasure to talk with Raymond Richard Neutra, an epidemiologist who served as the Chief of the Division of Environmental and Occupational Diseases at the California Department of Health. Before this long term of public service, he was a professor at UCLA and Harvard Medical School and was founding president of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology. Raymond carries on his family’s legacy as the founder and president of the LA based Neutra Institute for Survival Through Design. We discussed enriched environments, forming good habits through building habitats that support them and good design as a matter of public health. We mutually wondered whether or not neuroscience is necessary to architectural design or is environmental psychology enough? We talked about the necessity and richness of thick descriptions, body to body non-verbal communication, the 72 seasons in Japan, how eating is a social event, kinetic memories and much more . . .

For more than three decades, the cognitive neuroscientist Colin Ellard has been studying how urban environments shape our moods, behaviors and possibilities. He is a renowned authority and pioneer working at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience and architectural and urban design. He directs the Urban Realities Lab at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and is the author of several books including Places of the Heart: the Psychogeography of Everyday Life. He consults with architectural and urban design teams from all over the world. In this episode we talk about the universal attraction to vitality, boring building syndrome, our rich non-conscious experiences of places, how to speed people up or slow them down though methods of design and much more . . .

For this episode it is my pleasure to speak with the Respiratory Philosopher Petri Berndtson, the author of Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing and co-editor of the book Atmospheres of Breathing, he is a breath coach and research associate of the Science and Research Center, Koper Slovenia, past lecturer of Philosophy at Lahti University of Applied Sciences in Finland and the Trondheim School of the Arts in Norway. Our conversation took place in Helsinki, where we discussed the aerial phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard, Merleau Ponty, Petri's practice of mindfunfulness, the capacity of the Finnish language to express the rich subtleties of atmospheric consciousness and much more . . .

For this episode it is my pleasure to speak with the Respiratory Philosopher Petri Berndtson, the author of Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing and co-editor of the book Atmospheres of Breathing, he is a breath coach, mindfulness speaker and research associate of the Science and Research Center, Koper Slovenia, past lecturer of Philosophy at Lahti University of Applied Sciences in Finland and the Trondheim School of the Arts in Norway. Our conversation took place in Helsinki, where we discussed the Primacy of Breathing, and Petri's insistence that all philosophical questions need to be rethought and reimagined in terms of breathing and the elemental experience and poetry of the air.

This is Part Two of my conversation with Galen Cranz, emeritus professor at the graduate school of architecture at UC Berkeley, a certified Alexander teacher, founder of Body Conscious Design and the author of The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body and Design and the Politics of Park Design: a History of Urban Parks in America among others. We spoke about her training in the Alexander Technique, her studies in film at NYU, the evolution of her thinking that led to her landmark book, The Chair, why she founded Body Conscious Design--and much, much more . . .

In this episode I have the pleasure of speaking with Galen Cranz, emeritus professor at the graduate school of architecture at UC Berkeley, a certified Alexander teacher, founder of Body Conscious Design and the author of The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body and Design and the Politics of Park Design: a History of Urban Parks in America among others. We spoke about her training as a sociologist and her scholarly and design work on park design, and how her path somewhat paralleled that of Frederick Law Olmsted, whose well-known design work in shaping great American public spaces grew out of his role as a servant of public health--and much, much more . . .

For this episode it was my pleasure to talk with Guilherme Sanches de Oliveira, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at TU Berlin where he founded the Embody research group. He received his PhD from the University of Cincinatti, where he also studied experimental psychology at the Center for Cognition, Action and Perception. He earned his BA and MA at the University of São Paulo in Brazil working with Osvaldo Pessoa.  In part two of our conversation we discussed resonance, synergies as ways of understanding our relationship to our surroundings and much more . . .

For this episode it was my pleasure to talk with Guilherme Sanches de Oliveira, a philosopher and cognitive scientist whose primary influences are Gibsonian ecological psychology, dynamic systems theory and the philosophical traditions of pragmatism and phenomenology.   Since 2020 Guilherme has served as an assistant lecturer at TU Berlin where he founded the Embody research group. He received his Phd from the University of Cincinatti, where he also studied experimental psychology at the Center for Cognition, Action and Perception. He earned his BA and MA at the University of São Paulo in Brazil working with Osvaldo Pessoa.  In part one of our conversation we discussed 4EA cognition, niche construction theory, the problems of "hard" science, the WEIRD problem and much more . . .

For this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Klaus Gramann, an internationally leading experimental psychologist, professor and founder and director of the Brain Body Mobile Imaging Lab at the Technical University of Berlin. We discussed the mobile EEG technology that Klaus was instrumental in developing and what it an tell us about our brain/bodies in motion, how vision is different from the other senses, how the German language doesn’t have two terms differentiating between sensation and perception, instead they have the word “wahrnehmung” which more holistically means ‘to make sense” or to ‘take as true.”  We talked about the narrative quality of prediction,  the interpretive nature of perception, the limits and possibilities of neurourbanism and much more . . . .

This is part two of my conversation with Andrea Chiba, a behavioral neuroscientist and professor at the University of California San Diego. She co-founded the Global Science of Learning Education Network and was the founding Science Director for the NSF Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center, an NSF Science of Learning Center. We discuss the similarities between rats and people, the biological sense of empathy and fellow feeling, how touch and movement impact the brain and explore how modern day rituals can create connection and community and much, much more.