Our everyday life is increasingly
dependent on artificial environments, and often human sensibility
is neglected when convenience or economy has priority. For example,
artificial lighting can affect human biological rhythms, and excessive
use of artificial images and sounds can cause nervous disorders or
hearing impairments. Kyushu University, with its Faculty of Design,
whose ultimate purpose is to "humanize modern technology",
has been building an ideal environment to tackle such problems in
an interdisciplinary manner. We have thus decided to rebuild our organization
as a bridgehead for international cooperation for research and education
in related areas. We try to increase our understanding of human sensibility
by conducting physiological and psychological experiments, and the
knowledge obtained is applied to the actual design of artificial environments
directly. Our team is divided into three research units in order to
work efficiently, i.e. the units of "environmental physiology",
"perceptual psychology" and "design".The members
of the first two units study human vision, audition, olfaction, temperature
sensation, somatic sensation etc, and those belonging to the last
unit design lighting, images, sounds, air conditioning, architecture,
etc. We evaluate various artificial environments from a global viewpoint,
and draw guidelines to design suitable environments especially for
young children, senior citizens, and the disabled.
Educating doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers is also an
important aspect of our project. We receive students and young researchers
from all over the world, and train them in such a way that they gain
experience in at least two of the three above-mentioned research units.
This will enable us to organize small but productive collaboration
teams easily. We try to use both Japanese and English for communication
in order to make our project truly international. |
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