Kuniaki Ito

The visual information load as a parameter for designing pleasurable environment

This paper reports a study on the relation between the informational content of an artificially built environment and the emotional response to this environment. It presents the hypothesis that human response to a visual scene is influenced by the information of the scene and there is a uniform relationship between informational load of an architectural scene and the affective response. The paper defines an estimation function for entropy in a visual scene, then describes an experiment in which observers were asked to indicate their affective response to a computer generated renderings of an architectural interior, manipulated to have varying information on content by addition of textures and furnishing. The computer measured informational load was compared with the subjective evaluations of the respondents, for important interior characteristics like comfort, relaxation and attractiveness. The paper presents proofs that the measurement of the informational load of the scene is a unique characteristic of the given architectural interior.