Monday, 3 June 2013
In what ways can architecture impact human behavior?
Social scientists or psychologists links between the design of the built environment and our behavior, both individually and socially
Designing and constructing environments in which people live and work, architects and planners are necessarily involved in influencing human behavior.
While Sommer (1969, p.3) asserted that the architect “in his training and practice, learns to look at buildings without people in them,” it is clear that from, for example, Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902), through
Le Corbusier Ville Contemporaine and La Ville radieuse, to the Smithson's’ ‘Streets in the sky’, there has been a long-standing thread of recognition that the way people live their lives is directly linked to the designed environments in which they live. Whether the explicit intention to influence behavior drives the design process—architectural determinism (Broadly, 1966: see future blog post ‘POSIWID and determinism’)—or whether the behavior consequences of design decisions are only revealed and considered as part of a post-occupancy evaluation (e.g. Zeisel, 2006) or by social scientists or psychologists studying the impact of a development, there are links between the design of the built environment and our behavior, both individually and socially