The body responses and the role of neuro-design in the digital transition

The ongoing digitalisation is increasingly affecting Architecture and Design by becoming one of the main adopted tools for projects’ effectiveness, especially for ensuring fruitful communication between designers and non-professional users. However, in this specific context of an ever-growing design’s virtualisation as well as of the digital transition times, how are the technologies effectively perceived by the final users? The field of the user experience is increasingly gaining ground through the analysis and study of the good usability of the technological tools by, however, simultaneously showing a crucial gap in the analysis of the body experience. In an increasingly digitalised world that is moving further and further away from the physical world, the study of body perception almost in fact seems not to be addressed. However, the perceptive and emotional interaction between Digital Design and users first passes through the corporeal responses generated by the body, which is the threshold of cognitive and emotional experiences thanks to its ability to live the experiences without mental superstructures. Hence, are the technological tools somatically accepted? Moreover, in this perspective, is it possible to analyse the Digital Design impact on users’ corporeal responses? What are the tools to be used for this purpose? The body experience and the unconscious responses of the users must be the focus of innovative and interdisciplinary research able to understand the immediate and not psychic filtered response to the sensations that digital spaces and objects evoke. Based on this assumption, this paper aims to introduce the importance of the emergence of an arising field named “Neuro-Design” to highlight its potential application in the design field and, especially, in the evaluation of physical user experience in relation to Digital Design. The Neuro- Design is a research area with a huge potential to be discovered: it is in fact the result of the interdisciplinary combination between Neuroscience and Design, and it represents the possibility of the disciplines of planning to interface with the scientific areas that deal with human perception, behaviour and corporeal responses. The perspective of psychology and neuroscience can be crucial to understanding the human responses to Design and its boosted use of digital tools. This approach could in fact enriches the designers’ awareness of the impact of their choices by increasing their ability to be at the service of society. In this framework, the present paper opens new horizons by placing at the center people’s physical feelings and their physiological reactions by bearing in mind the goal of more aware planning in the context of the current digital transition, highlighting possible future developments and research directions that call for the adoption of an interdisciplinary method or, perhaps, of an in(ter)disciplinary approach that moves from the knowledge of the human body overcoming disciplinary boundaries.