Probing environmental effects on users
 The field of built environments research, as (du Toit 2013) pointed out, has not developed their own, established research methodologies. Therefore, more research into what kinds of methodologies are effective and yield congruent results with each other in this field needs to be done. In this paper, I am to precisely do this: experiment with a quantitative and a qualitative methodology and see whether they yield similar results. The specific methodologies I decided to use are: surveys, a field study, and mapping and visualization. As seen in the right-most column in the image below from du Toit 2013, testing the congruency of these 3 methodologies would allow me to begin to fill the gap between different core logics, or modes of reasoning. This would result in a research study that will have a wider impact on the community, because it will have several integrated dimensions of meaning.
I.               Pre-Experiment Survey
The first phase of data collection will a survey. The survey will be distributed to as many NYU students as possible, with the goal of receiving 30-50 responses. It will have the aim to identify the areas on campus that are most used and visited by students. The survey will ask students to select which areas they visit on campus and estimate how much time they spend in it. This will allow me to identify locations and spaces that have the most impact on students because that’s where students spend the most time in. These spaces will be incorporated into paths created for the next stage of data collection: the assisted walks.
II.              Field Study: Assisted Walks
In this phase, I am to conduct one experiment using two different methodologies: affective sensing and user-input emotional index data. These two methodologies will be used during “assisted walks,” or walks where a researcher (myself) will walk around campus with a user to attempt and map that user’s feelings as they relate to physical locations. This allows the researcher to then create “feeling maps,” which was a technique developed by Yodan Rofè (2004) but which dates back to David Lynch (1960). The experiment in this paper will be modeled after a previous study by Weinreb 2013. In her study, Weinreb accompanied 55 participants on walks around a city in Israel and after compiling all the data, she created a feeling map of the town (see image below). This allowed her to identify any clusters of emotions that correlated with specific locations in