ANFA 2025 - Day 1 - Through the Interface

In my last post I was heading from Nashville to San Diego for a conference organized by the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture - ANFA 2025.

As mentioned at the end of the post, there was some uncertainty about whether I would be able to get to San Diego, given an incident at the airport that led to the main runway being shut, and lots of inbound flights being either diverted or cancelled. Mine ended up in the latter bucket, but only after I'd ordered my "dinner".

I was told Delta would automatically rebook my flight for the following day and provide details about a hotel room for the night. Neither thing ended up happening until I finally went up to the Delta desk in the arrivals hall. I'd missed the rebooking window and the first available flight was at 10pm on the first day of the conference. Not great.

I found out there was a 7am flight to LAX (the first flight to SAN was at 9am) which had some space. I was rebooked but told I should come back "early" to MSP the following morning. By this point it was past midnight, so I should really say later that day. I asked what "early" meant in practice: the agent said it gets really busy from 4am. Gulp. I ended up heading to the Comfort Inn in Bloomington, Minnesota, sleeping for 2.5 hours and heading back on the 3:30am shuttle to the airport.

I changed my ticket and got through security quite quickly (in fairness it might have gotten busy soon after), so had 3 hours to wait before catching my flight to LAX.

The flight was uneventful, thankfully, and I managed to nod off for an hour or so.

I arrived in LAX just before 9am and then took the shuttle to LAX-it, from where all the standard rider-sharing happens.

I managed to get an UberX ride pretty quickly, and had a very pleasant 2-hour drive down to La Jolla. I spent some time chatting about podcasts with my driver, Elmer, but also napping.

Arriving at UCSD there were lots of returning students - it must be the beginning of the semester.

I managed to find a sign pointing to the ANFA location in Mosaic Hall.

Arriving just after 11am, I was actually basically on time. Jacky was still helping get some things set up.

One of our aims from engaging people at ANFA was to explore whether some work we've been doing with Workshop XR might be relevant to Neuroarchitecture research.

We've been working with the Workshop XR team to create a version of the tool that sends data to our servers regarding the human behaviour and experience. We can see how people navigate through the virtual space, what they look at and what they say at various points during their walkthrough.

We take this data and use it to build a rudimentary "sentiment map" of the space, giving us the ability to display heat maps of the sentiments expressed by the various participants.

We spent a lot of time talking to ANFA attendees about this approach: Workshop XR is intended for collaborative review by design teams rather than for any kind of stakeholder engagement or experience capture, so in many cases visual quality has been compromised to prioritize loading larger models. Aesthetics are a secondary priority, understandably. This is likely to shift, over time, as the general visual quality will inevitably improve. Even so, we have found that the general quality of material display is in many cases adequate for many research purposes. We shall see.

In the main ANFA session, the first day's theme was "Designing for Every Brain", with themes of Neurodiversity, Inclusion, and the Future of Learning Environments.

There was some really great information, although I will say that the lack of sleep made it might easier for me to be outside talking to people than absorbing lecture material.It was a long day but very rewarding. Dagmara, Jacky and I headed back to our hotel for some dinner.