Visual Discomfort Health Concerns in the Future Cities of the Arabian Gulf: Case of Bahrain
Abstract
Like the rest of the world, the landscape of architecture has changed in many of the Arabian Gulf cities with the introduction of new design technologies and parameterisation methods. Some of the contemporary designs of building facades comprise of perforated walls generated by computer software. Such perforations are similar in their shapes and nature to the Lotus Seed Pod. An image with specific spatial properties that have been found to negatively affect its viewers and cause a state of visual discomfort termed trypophobia. The new condition, recently studied by a limited number of researchers triggers physiological and psychological reactions
that range from headaches, sickness to even vomiting in some extreme cases. Using on-site surveys as the primary method for investigation, this research measures the baseline of the trypophobic population in Bahrain to be between 26.50% and 39.32%, a number that is much larger than the UK’s estimated baseline of 13–17%. The results also showed that reactions to natural stimuli are much more severe than manmade
ones. Nevertheless, reactions to manmade stimuli are still significant. The study highlights the need to further investigate the effects of parameterisation methods on building designs in relation to visual discomfort.
Keywords: Trypophobia, visual discomfort, Architecture, Bahrain
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