Why PEARL's USP is so important

Are we looking to the future with tunnel vision? PEARL was created to reconsider the future with a broader vision. Sciences give us a better understanding of the present; the arts give us a better conception of the future; engineering enables this to happen now…

Why is PEARL so different from other research facilities? When people visit PEARL for the first time, they are generally and genuinely amazed. They are usually already aware of what it looks like, often from images on the website and other sources, and have often been told about it by others. Yet they are extremely surprised when they step into the facility for the first time. Why the surprise? They are generally prepared for the size and scale of the space, but they are shocked by the sense of presence in there. This is in part due to the acoustics - the reverberation time is very low, and so the disconnect between the visual and aural interpretations of the space creates a situation in which their reaction is to recalibrate their internal perception systems.

This effect is the kernel of why PEARL is so special, not just for the world of urban design or disciplines like psychology, neuroscience and so on, but for the world of learning, knowledge and wisdom. It is inside this space where we can explore the inner workings of the mind in a way that is simply not possible elsewhere. What PEARL explores is not the physics and chemistry - or even biology - of people interacting with the environment around them. Instead we study their responses to these interactions: how people feel about their experience of living in environments, as a measure of the meaning of what those responses are.

Yes we set up physical and sensory environments and control the conditions under which they engage people (note that we speak of "engage with" rather than "expose to": these interactions are multi-way, multi-path situations, responses and reactions). If we just studied what the temperature of a bus is, it would be ordinary. Studying how people feel about that environment is extraordinary: not only the sense of temperature, but also the visual, aural, tactile, emotional sensations add up to this experience. This is highly challenging because in the end we do not really know what perception is or how it translates into responses and reactions to the environment. These processes are tucked away in the preconscious as well as the conscious mind, so even the person experiencing them is unaware of what is happening. 

We have been developing methods to explore this combined world of the preconscious and conscious mind. Various experiments have provided opportunities to learn how the preconscious and conscious processes link together. But one thing that is standing out as we refine these methods is that the route into this understanding lies in the arts. Whatever the sophistication of the science that we bring to this learning, it simply does not answer the fundamental question of "how do people feel" about the situation. The arts provide humans' own way of expressing this. This is why our Arts-Sciences Programme (https://www.pearl.place/aspire) is so important. 

Directed by Sara Adhitya, ASPIRE brings together the perspectives of the arts and the methods

of science in order to expand our understanding of the way in which people respond and react to the environment around them. These environments could be silence, darkness, or light, and they could be music, visual, olfactory, haptic and so on - but actually they are a combination of all of these. That is the sophistication of the human brain, that it can synthesise all of these experiences simultaneously to derive a perception of the world that in turn drives the person's interpretation that sets off responses, reactions and more. Experiments and events that we run through the ASPIRE programme are generally small in scale but incredibly important for how we develop our overall thinking for all the work we do. It is these experiments that allow us to probe the inner recesses of how we create and extend the realities we perceive and so help us to understand how to develop the experiments that are more directly related to daily life. This is PEARL’s USP.

This approach is unique - environmental scale and control tied together with internal perception through artistic expression is not studied synthetically elsewhere, because nowhere else has this combination of possibilities. Yet this is how we as human beings actually experience the world. So we are having to develop these methods through the work that we are doing in PEARL. Experiments designed to answer specific environmental problems (e.g. alert sounds for e-scooters) can offer insights to the way in which the brain processes environmental stimuli from the perspective of specific environmental situations (e.g. busy urban traffic). On the other hand, experiments designed to explore artistic expression enable us to start to figure out how to create the worlds in which that artistic expression can thrive. A good example might be the Empathy Machine (https://www.pearl.place/aspire 06), where artistic expression is used to help convey feelings which are otherwise difficult to communicate. When we bring the two approaches together, we have the possibility of exploring how people feel about the environments they are encountering.

Frank A, Gleiser M, Thompson E (2025 The Blind Spot, MIT Press p 143) suggest that "Self-individuation, agency, and dependent autonomy - "needful freedom" in Jonas's (Jonas H (2001) The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, Northwestern University Press) words - make life unlike anything else in nature or anything we manufacture". This means that simply relying on physicochemical or mechanical models to represent perceptions, responses or reactions is inherently insufficient for understanding why people behave in the way they do. Enactive Cognition theorists embrace the "irreducible primacy of direct experience and accordingly strive to move beyond the Blind Spot ["the failure of conventional science to see direct experience as the irreducible wellspring of knowledge" (p xiv)] in their investigations of the mind" (Frank, Gleiser & Thompson 2025, p 165). In PEARL the arts, whether experienced as a creator/performer or beholder/audience, give us an opportunity to create a different kind of representation of this process, one which is much more responsive to the engaged world of living people. PEARL then gives us a great opportunity to open up the Blind Spot and begin to understand much better how people engage with the environment around them.

PEARL therefore opens up the possibility of reconsidering how we think about situations such as living with cognitive differences such as dementia and autism, differences in vision or hearing and of course the whole process of creating perception more generally. And this means opening up a whole new world of ways of learning, exploring and understanding how people engage with the worlds they encounter.

Is this so fantastical? Not at all. Bringing ASPIRE and our other work together is how we developed the sound for the e-scooters, the way of determining thermal comfort on buses, the improvements of boarding and alighting in trains, all of which have been deployed in operation. What we have learnt from these projects also helps us to develop improved ways of understanding the creative processes involved in the arts. This is a truly symbiotic relationship, and one on which we can build future understanding.

Tunnel vision for the future? Not in PEARL!