ABSTRACT
Assessing perceptions of environmental characteristics and affective appraisals of environments has relevance to programming and evaluating places. With appropriate choices of environmental stimuli, measures, and respondents, one can create solid visual quality guidelines for design. For specific projects, one can develop visual quality guidelines by determining the visual qualities desired for the particular project, context, and populations. For this, the design programmer should investigate, develop, gather, and organize information to produce design guidelines that support the visual quality goals for the facility. Recognizing the connection between function and appearance, visual quality programming creates guidelines within which the design should operate. This consumer-oriented approach involves people in decisions that affect them. Scientific tests of this approach have found that public appraisals of likely meanings of designs accurately fit the actual meanings conveyed by the designs. The resulting visual quality program can both answer immediate questions about visual quality and feed into a database to help answer future questions.
