Environmental Psychology: Design Guidelines for Homes, Offices, Classrooms, & Hospitals

Whyte’s Study of Factors that Influence the Social Life of Urban Spaces

1. Amount of sitting space
2. Proportion of women and groups in the area
3. Sun, wind, trees, and water
4. Availability of food
5. Connection to the street
6. The “undesirables” relative to other users
7. Effective capacity -- underuse vs. overuse
8. Triangulation: brings people together in a public space and make it informal (e.g. putting a piano in a public space, having people gather informally while someone is playing)

Two Hundred and Fifty Three Design Guidelines Compliments of Christopher Alexander and Colleagues

• “All 253 patterns together form a language. They create a coherent picture of an entire region, with the power to generate such regions in a million forms, with infinite variety in all the details.”

3 Levels of Design Guidelines

• Behavioral Statement: deals with values, needs, and activities

• Performance Standard: begins to tie known behavior or need with supportive physical environment but doesn’t say how

• Perspective Guideline: tells designer clearly what to do

  

• Intimacy Gradient: unless spaces in a building are arranged in a sequence that corresponds to the degrees of privateness, the visits made by strangers, friends, guests, clients, and family will always be a little awkward. People need a gradient of settings that have different degrees of intimacy and when they have that gradient, they can place themselves depending on their relationship to the occupants where they belong. So if you’re a visitor to somebody’s home, you don’t go right back to their bedroom. You go in the kind of aunty room or living room where you come in the front door or in a peruvian home, you might go into the sala.

  • Behavioral Statement: People need that gradient of intimacy in order to organize their relationships (formal -> informal, private -> public)
  • Need for intimacy gradient has been observed in a lot of different countries and a lot of different ethnicities
  • Applies to just about every building type, homes, shops, offices, buildings, churches
  • Create a sequence which begins with the entrance in the most public parts of the building and then leads into the more private ares and finally to the most private domains

• Windows Overlooking Life: rooms without a view are prisons for the people that have to stay in them. When people are in a place for any length of time, they need to be able to refresh themselves by looking at a world different from the one they’re in . People need that sort of change of pace, they need to be able to take a break from what they’re looking at on their desk or computer, look outside and refresh their view.

  • Talks about how people always evaluate windowless rooms and buildings very negatively, they feel trapped, kind of cloistered 
  • When given the choice, people always choose offices that have windows that have natural light and typically people prefer windows that have meaningful views. They have good view amenities
  • People recovering from gallbladder surgery: the more they had views of nature, the faster they recovered, the less pain medication they requested
  • Design Guideline
  • Place the windows in such a way that their total area conforms roughly to the appropriate figures for your region
  • Window space to floor space may vary according to the region and culture
  • 25% or better coverage for the windows
  • Prescriptive Guideline
  • 25-50 square foot of wall space should be devoted to windows for every 100 square feet of floor space

• The more interesting mixed uses you have in a city or a neighborhood, the better the neighborhood’s going to work

Why do people like windows?

• Views amenities, including restorative views of nature
• Sense of connection with outside events and the diurnal cycle
• Health and productivity benefits of natural light and “fresh air”
• Status considerations in work environments

Adaptations to Windowlessness

• Occupants of windowless space used twice as many visual materials to decorate their offices than those with windowed offices
• People in windowless offices used more landscapes and fewer cityscapes to decorate their offices than did occupants of windowed spaces
• Sun pipes and light tubes: bringing natural light into windowless spaces

Health Care Facilities Design: An Essential Part of Patients’ Therapy and Recovery

• Provide indoor and outdoor access to nature
• Maintain comfortable levels of lighting, temperature, and sound
• Provide way-finding aids for patients and visitors
• Enable patients and their visitors to regulate privacy and territoriality effectively
• Emphasize environmental symbols of caring and support

Guidelines for Health Care Facilities Design

• Making signage legible
• Providing window views for patients 
• Behavioral Principle of environmental cognition and legibility
  • Making signages simpler for people to read
• People can remember places easier if they have labels/names rather than numbers because it gives people more mnemonic memory devices to be able to code it
• Indoor Sunlight: we need to bring natural sunlight into the interior buildings

Complexities Inherent in Developing Design Guidelines

• Different types of design guidelines are required for different kinds of settings (e.g., residences, workplaces, health care settings, public spaces)
• Within any particular setting, the diverse perspectives of multiple user groups must be considered
• Different kinds of design guidelines for the same setting may conflict with each other
• Design guidelines must be prioritized according to the predominant needs of key user groups and in light of research and resource limitations
• Design guidelines must be updated periodically as the needs of user groups change over time

Multiple User Groups Within a Hospital Environment

• Patients, visitors, nurses, and physicians all have different kinds of needs within medical settings

Sommer and Olsen’s “Soft Classroom”

• Features included pillows and foam cushions instead of chairs; writing boards instead of desks; carpeting; greater lighting controls; decorative items, graffiti pads
• The soft classroom promoted student participation rates that we 2-3 times as high as those observed in traditional classrooms with rows of desks
• You can get more sociopathic active participatory classroom by loosening up the physical environment, making it more comfortable and informal

Creative Capital Theory

• “Regional economic growth is driven by the location choices of creative people -- the holders of creative capital -- who prefer places that are diverse, tolerant, and open to new ideas
• 3 T’s of Regional Economic Development
  • Talent, technology, tolerance
  • They have to be places that tolerate different lifestyles, different points of view, different ethnicities so there’s not a lot of prejudice and hateful stuff against one group or another group. When you have that kind of environment, you have a much more economically viable community.

Quality of Place

• The unique set of characteristics that define a place and make it attractive. Richard Florida emphasizes 3 dimension of place quality:
  • What’s There: combination of the built and natural environment; a proper setting for the pursuit of creative lives
  • Who’s There: diverse kinds of people, interacting and providing cues that anyone can plug into and make a life in that community
  • What’s Going On: the vibrancy of street life, cafe culture, arts, music, and people engaging in outdoor activities -- altogether, a lot of active, exciting, creative endeavors

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