PLACES OF THE HEART

From our homes to our workplaces to places of amusement, restoration, and incarceration, Ellard helps us to understand how we are shaped by them, and how designers are planning to change them in the future. He shows us how the design of cities works for good and ill, and how memories of places affect our future selves.

Experimental psychologist Colin Ellard specializes in psychogeography: how our surroundings influence our thoughts, emotions, and behavior. His first book, You Are Here, about way-finding, had fabulous reviews in the USA and Canada. SINCE YOU ARE HERE was published in 2009, Colin has gone on to raise his profile considerably via such things as a blog in Psychology Today, leading a world-wide psychogeography project for the Guggenheim Lab in New York (see attachments), and a profile in Scientific American. He has devoted the last four years and counting to the project described in the attached proposal: the discovery of how psychogeography shapes our everyday lives, and how it is changing and will change in the future. As he says in the sample chapter, through modern technology “the setting of our life story is evolving from a passive space in which we act out our existence to an active participant in it.”