Working with Atmospheres to Improve our Planet's Mood

In studies on sustainability and environment, there are few references to perception and emotion. We believe that part of the environmental crisis which we find ourselves in nowadays is due to the fact that environmental issues have almost always been dealt with from an exclusively scientific-analytical point of view. The lack of a sensory approach in the study of our habitats has generated a crisis of perception of our environment that has led to a planetary climate crisis, an increase in pollution, a general depletion of earth resources, and a great loss of biodiversity. We have lost the ability to perceive the dynamics that permeate in our environments, so the disaster becomes invisible. Understanding the environment as atmosphere can be of great help to generate more emotional and human approaches to the design of our habitats since through atmospheres, we link spatial experiences with the states of mind. Perceiving atmospheres is mainly a bodily act to feel the state of the world, to transform it and to transform ourselves as inhabitants of a healthier planet. In this essay we aim to show the experience of the Space Exploration Course taught in the first year of Environmental Design at the Gengdan Institute of Beijing University of Technology (2020-21) in which students explored the generation of atmospheres linking spatial experiences of our environment with the states of mind. In this way, complementary to the analytical and rational thinking, the students developed a sensory thinking, which we consider fundamental to understand and feel the complexity of the environment. In the essay we will attempt to explain some fundamental ideas about atmosphere, perception and environment that served as the basis for the course and that point to the development of a necessary new ecological thinking.