ABSTRACT

We have seen how a wide range of aspects of our world produce a range of feelings, attitudes, and behaviours in individuals. Many of these aspects are largely beyond our control, such as weather and climate, although even these are to some extent being dominated. For example we now have large indoor holiday parks where everything is under cover and temperature controlled. In this chapter we will focus specifically on the physical environment and how research can inform us in regard to future design. It is impossible not to be influenced by the design of our environment, whether in terms of homes, work spaces, parking lots, schools, hospitals, or the larger scale urban or rural environment. Over the past few weeks the local council have been redesigning a road junction close to my home. Most people were unaware of the impending change until workmen arrived and erected temporary traffic lights. The work itself caused a great deal of distress with long lines of traffic in the rush hours. When it was complete it turned out that turning right on the way out of town had been prohibited, meaning that for several hundred people, including myself, returning from town meant finding another route. This is a minor junction in a small area, but one can see that the design process could have been made less stressful for local residents. The landscape of many cities bears evidence of the failure to consider human behaviour and experience in the design process. For example the oft quoted example of Pruitt-Igoe, a building project in St Louis, USA, which was acclaimed in 1954 and demolished in 1972. This vast development of high rise accommodation became a centre for crime, fear, high levels of mental illness, and eventually underused to the extent that it was considered better to remove it permanently. It is just one example of the many such failures in cities across the world which attest to the need to consider people in the planning process. This concern for people is referred to as social design to distinguish it from the more formal design process (Gifford, 1987). However social design needs to be incorporated within formal design. The need for social design could be argued to be a product of industrial development, just as the loss of traditional communities has led to the need to create social support networks. Within many communities in the past, buildings were on a smaller scale, often built by the local community in collaborative effort, therefore involving the people who would use the building in all stages of the process. This democratic process seems to have been lost in our industrialised and technologically advanced world.