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The Place of Architectural Psychology: A Consideration of Some Findings by David V. Canter BA, PhD, Research Fellow, Building Performance Research Unit, Strathclyde University

Facts without Theories It is often believed that new instruments for research do of themselves produce great increases in knowledge. Even if this view is rarely stated explicitly it underlies much of the thinking about methods of categorising spaces such as that by Thiel (1961) or the listing of techniques for research (Craik 1970, Sanoff 1968, Canter and Wools 1970). When startling insights do not come tumbling out from the latest technique, the research workers show some puzzlement.

They should not be surprised because an instrument can be no better than the theory upon which it is based and the data collected from an instrument are of no more value than the hypothesis they help to support. As Brecht illustrates the emissaries from the Pope refused to look through Galileo's telescope because the data it presented were irrelevant to their understanding of the universe. This is not to dismiss technology or empirical data in the development of science. The results of doing so would be sterile theorising and the production of concepts which are inapplicable to the real everyday world. The implications for design of facts without theories are possibly even greater than they are for psychology, for if these facts are to be used by a designer they must be couched in spatial terms. They therefore inevitably present the designer with a predigested design solution. In other words, the research worker takes upon himself that task for which the architect is particularly suited; the manipulation of space. If the architect is not to modify, manipulate or create spatial forms, what is he to do?

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It is assumed that given the right techniques we shall eventually produce a complete list of human needs and will learn what aspect of the environment will satisfy each The asides in the human needs literature belie this basic concept of people consisting of a set of distinct, static needs each of which can be separately satisfied. 0

What then is the place of architectural psychology? If collecting data on the specifiC architectural requirements of building users is going to lead to unimaginative architecture and is based on a doubtful psychological premise, what is the contribution to be made? The answer is not simple and is not likely to be readily accepted by the present generation of architects. It can be briefly stated by saying that the contribution of psychology should be to study the processes of interaction between buildings and their users with the aim of making architects understand more clearly the psychological impact of the built environment. This will influence their designs by changing their attitudes towards architecture. This approach is unlikely to produce any design solutions, but architects themselves are the experts in the production of design solutions and assistance at that level from psychologists or sociologists is neither necessary nor desirable. 2

Towards a Theory

What is really being suggested is that more effort should be put into the development of 8 theory that will explain the facts we have at present and which will guide us in the facts we are to look for in the future.

Before entering into the dangerous waters :: theory building, two warnings from the C21andhui conference should be borne in mind o Stringer (1970) suggests if an understanding of t:.e relationship between architecture and psychology is to be achieved, we must deal ·,'.-Hh the process of architecture and the !=,ocess of psychology in the same terms. Tjis means that our explanation of how people ::-:teract with their physical environment should 31so contribute to an understanding of how j"Jildings are designed. The second warning 'Canter 1970) is that the subjective experience :)f a building and the objective observation of :)Iners using it must both be taken into account if we are to gain anything like a complete picture of the process of building/user inter3ction. If such all-embracing warnings are to be dealt with we must start from some simple fundamental observations. Such observations can be made all around us. The :-:10 st common fact of the interaction of people with buildings is that in the great majority of cases behaviour and the places in which it is carried out seem appropriate to one another. It is generally accepted that people sleep in bedrooms, sit in sitting rooms, do clerical work in offices, and so on. So far research workers have come up with few surprises with regard to where people do things. This fact of appropriateness deals with the first warnings because it can be seen that it is precisely because architects are aware of the patterns of appropriateness which exist that they are able to produce usable buildings, and it is because most people are also aware of these same ,:Jatterns that they are able to use these productions. The second warning is also heeded if we start from this point. The experience of appropriateness and the observation of appropriate behaviour are both amenable to study and complement each other. 3

The Search for Appropriateness

However, if patterns of appropriateness are considered only as a state which does or does not exist then much of the reality of human behaviour will be lost and many research findings will remain unexplained; rather they should be considered a goal towards which people aim. Two examples from research at Strathclyde will serve to illustrate some of the potentials of this approach for the interpretation of findings.

In a study of the effect of office size on clerical performance (Canter 1968), office workers doing similar jobs in the same department but working in rooms of different sizes were given clerical aptitude tests. When the subjects were tested in the offices where they normally worked, a marked decrease in ability was found as office size increased, but a control group tested in other rooms showed no such relationship with room size. Any approach which deals only with the direct effect of the physical environment on behaviour would have difficulty explaining these results. On the other hand, some approach which considers the possibility of clerical workers searching (consciously or not) for an appropriate or suitable working environment can easily explain the fact that the more able workers tended to work in surroundings generally accepted by clerical workers as more acceptable; that is, smaller offices. The second example (Canter 1970) was an investigation of seating preferences in seminars among undergraduates. It was found that the distance of the lecturer from th e front row of chairS did not affect seating behaviour when the chairs were arranged in semi-circular form. When, however, the chairs were laid out in a rectangular block the closer the lecturer stood to the front row, the further back the undergraduates sat. It seems plausible that the form of the physical environment gives rise to expectations about what activities will be carried out, and people adjust their behaviour in accordance with these expectations. Semi-circular seating is probably perceived as informal, but rectangular seating is perceived as formal, and these students did not wish to become too deeply involved in a formal activity so they sat further back. In other words, what is being suggested is that taking the accepted (or appropriate) behaviour for a particular seating arrangement as a starting point they modified their own behaviour to fit into that pattern in a way they felt would be satisfactory. 4

Categories

Before this notion of patterns of appropriateness can contribute in any detail to architectural understanding, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms by which they develop and change and the way in which they are organised. The ideas which Lee

(1970) put forward can be seen as central to this. He suggests that during the process of growing up objects and activities are mentally coded, not only in terms of what they are but also in terms of where they are. This coding leads to the formation of schemata or mental maps which relate things and activities to places. As Lee shows, much observable behaviour is consistent with the existence of these schemata and apparent inconsistencies in behaviour can be explained as maintaining consistent schema. These mental maps can be thought of as containing summaries of a person's experience of the relationships between things, activities and places; summaries, that is, of patterns of appropriateness. However, in order to summarise these patterns or relationships it is necessary to codify or at least describe the constituent parts in some way. It must be possible to say what type of place it is and what type of thing or activity and then to examine the appropriateness of one for the other in terms of existing mental maps. This categorising of the constituent parts is a complex process and it seems likely that categories can exist at many levels of abstractness and be formed from many viewpoints or along many dimensions. The studies carried out in order to explore the ways in which people think about physical environments, such as those reported by Vielhauer (1965), Hershberger (1968) and Collins (1969), are esentially examinations of the coding systems people use. Our own work at Strathclyde (Canter 1969a), looking at a number of buildings and dealing with representations as well as actual buildings, do help to support a general pattern found in the American studies. Four general dimensions can be discerned all dealing with what appear to be different aspects of what might be called emotional response. Any naming of these dimensions must be to some extent arbitrary but the four central concepts may be called 'pleasantness', 'comfort', 'friendliness', and 'coherence' It would be found that the judgements of many different kinds of people, including architects, could conveniently be described in these terms, those of architects differing mainly in their distinguishing more clearly between the different factors (Canter 19 69b) • Further studies of this type are necessary, particularly with regard to eliciting the underlying dimensions of activities, 0

things, people from the viewpoint of the places to which they are appropriate. Such studies are now in process at Strathclyde, being carried out by Stephen Tagg and John Firth Once the results of these studies are available then it will be possible to start drawing up an overall picture of the patterns of appropriateness which exist in the building context. Already it can be seen that the picture might not be nearly as complicated as was originally thought. The work we have carried out relating aspects of building to the friendliness dimension (Wools ahd Canter 1970, Canter and Wools 1970, Wools 1970) has shown that in general the furnishings account for 43%, the roof height and angle 33% and the window size and shape about 11% of the variance in the friendliness scores. The residual variance of 13% remaining unaccounted for suggests that at least when using drawings and photographs of models we are dealing with a significant proportion of the actual psychological variance involved. 0

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Interaction and Adaption

It is apparent all around that people do interact with buildings and, as was mentioned earlier, there is evidence of a positive search for appropriateness. If the dimensions and relationships between them grow out of an interaction between the people and buildings then it is likely that the building itself has some influence on the particular dimensions people use. Evidence for this is shown by a factor analysis of answers to questions about the physical environment in two different schools. This showed that in one building daylighting, a view and sunshine were closely associated, but answers to questions about 'lighting' were taken to refer purely to electric 1 ighting, while heating and ventilating were thought of as distinct from either of the other two categorie s. In the second building daylight and electric light plus vi.ew formed one factor, sunlight and ventilation a second and heating alone a third, The first school was of relatively compact plan with a central courtyard, the second more of a 'finger plan'. The reasons for the groupings is obvious from consideration of the plans but had the answers to questionnaires been taken purely at their face value in a study of, for instance, the 'need for daylight' they would have been very misleading. Pursuing the implications of this finding it might be suggested that people think about different kinds of buildings in

:'~~:"':-ent

ways. It seems that this might give clue as to why some bUildings are thought :: S ",'iOrks of architecture' and others merely 5S ;)"Jildings; for some reason different ways ::: tiinking of the building s are used, different ::::-::eria are applied in assessing them.

This lends support again to our active model of interaction, that the teachers positively benefit from the modification rather than it just keeping them up to a minimum level.

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The same phenomenom can be seen : :::curring with regard to spaces within buildings ::-. " recent study at Strathclyde, Ann Telford :J-Jnd that the relationship between the ;:rivacy dimension and the pleasantness ::imension differed depending on which room Jf the house was being examined. It can thus be seen that measurable re~ationships

do exist between the different categories of our spatial coding system but the se relationships are modified by the particular building involved. One of the mo st likely reasons for this modification is that the categories and relationships develop from an interaction with the particular environme nt. If this were so, then a range of other relationships should be found. The most likely one is that between time and satisfaction with a building for, as the interaction with building continues, so the assessment of that interaction, or satisfaction, would be modified. The direction of this relationship might well be the best overall estimate of the quality of a bUilding that we can obtain. If it is highly negative then the building is a poor one as increased knowedge of it and interaction with it is leading to increasing dissatisfaction. In other words, a good building is one which 'withstands the test of time' . In our studies of school buildings (Canter 1970b) we have found a consistently negative relationship between various aspects of satisfaction and the age of a school building. The curve seems to level off after about 10 years and the relationship cannot be explained by differences in the age or make-up of the staff or the length of time they have been in the building, rather the relationship seems to be between the school organisation as a whole and the building in general. One other finding from our schools study has been the relationship between expressed satisfaction with the size of classrooms and the space within them and the number of modifications of the building which could be observed on a visit to the school. Interestingly, the relationship is such that the more modifications made the more satisfied the teachers.

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Complexity and Appropriateness

If this notion of a positive search for appropriate patterns of interaction with the environment is to contribute to the development of architecture besides discovering what the patterns are which exist, we need to know a lot more about the underlying mechanisms which contribute to causing any given relationship to be accepted or considered appropriate. It seems likely that many things will contribute to the particular level of appropriateness expected or accepted in a particular situation. The example given by Hill (1970) serves to illustrate this. Hill showed that the balance between amount of inward and outward vision selected as desirable by people was influenced by the type of room in which they assumed they were and their personality characteristics. The balance of inward to outward vision which was appropriate for some rooms in a house was not appropriate for others. In other words the level of appropriateness of any particular balance varied from condition to condition.

In this work Hill was concentrating on the variation of a relatively small and specific aspect of the environment, the view in and out, and that it was partly because he was attending to such a small part that variations in appropriateness were so subtle. If he had explored all the phenomena which might vary the picture that emerged would probably have been very complex indeed. What is needed, therefore, is to isolate those key aspects of the environment whose changes are critical in determining the appropriateness of that environment for a given activity. Ideally, these aspects would relate to the ways in which people think about buildings (the classification system upon which they build up their mental maps) and as a consequence should help to indicate the ways in which people differ in dealing with their environment. One such aspect of the environment might well be its complexity; the number of different things going on within it, the variety or intensity of information available from it. Exactly how to measure complexity in a given situation is as yet difficult to determine but it does not seem too great a leap to suggest

that, other things being equal, more complex environments will produce a higher level of physiological arousal in the users of those environments. This is, of course, an hypothesis open to investigation but it is plausible that the measures of arousal described by Payne (1970) and Griffiths (1970) might well be considered as estimates of the psychological complexity of the environment studied. This concept of complexity would help to explain some of the relationships referred to earlier, such as the reduction in satisfaction over time being due to a reduction in psychological complexity. Relationships between aspects of the physical environment and friendliness such as those referred to earlier in the studies carried out by Wools (1970) might well benefit from examination in terms of the complexity of the stimulus material. One further possibility that stems from this idea of patterns of appropriateness being developed to meet various levels of environmental arousal is that of relating environmental effects directly to variations between individuals. This can be done because of the known differences between individuals in terms of their cognitive complexity (the number of cognitive dimensions they have for handling any particular judgement) • Briefly, it has been found (Canter 1970c) that there are definite relationships between satisfaction (which for the present we may take as an estimate of the degree to which an environment provides an appropriate setting for a range of activities) and the cognitive complexity of an individual. In the school situation this is usually such that the more complex the individual the less satisfied he is with the school building. The implications of this direction of inquiry can be drawn from some very recent studies not yet written up. Wools has found that dealing with simple and complex stimuli and judgements of friendliness made by simple and complex people there is a clear interaction between type of person and type of stimuli in influencing judgements. Furthermore, Firth has found some relationship between the complexity of the stimulus effects and the age of schoolchildren. In other words, as the children get older so the aspects of the environment which influence their judgement get more complex. Might the development of this latter approach not eventually give us some rationale for school design?

Canter, D.V. (1968), Office Size: An example of psychological research in architecture, Architects' Journal, 24th April, 881-888. Canter, D. V. (19 69a), The Measurement of Appropriateness in Buildings, Transactions of the Bartlett Society, 6, 40-60. Canter, D. V. (1969b), An Intergroup Comparison of Connotative Dimensions in Architecture, Environment and Behaviour, 1, 1, 38-48. Canter, D. V. (197 oa), Should we treat bullding users as subjects or objects? in Canter (1970d) • Canter, D. v. (1970b), Architectural Psychology and School Design, Scottish Educational Studies (in pres s) • Canter, D.V. (1970c), Individual differences in response to the physical environment, Paper presented to BPS Annual Conference, Southampton, April 19700 Canter, D. V. (l970d), Architectural Psychology, RIBA Publications: Londono Canter, D.V. and Wools, R.M. (1970) A verbal measure for bUildings Building, 19 June 218, 6631, 73-76. Collins, J .B. (1969) Perceptual Dimensions of Architectural Space validated against behavioural criteria PhD thesis, University of Utah. Craik, K.H. (1970) Environmental Psychology, in Newcomb J.M. New Directions in Psychology 4, Holt, Rinehart and Winston: New York, 1-121. Griffiths, LD. (1970) Thermal Comfort: A behavioural approach in Canter (1970d). Hershberger, R.G. (1968) A study of meaning in Architecture Man and his environment, 1, 6, 6-7. Hill, A. (1970) Visibility and Privacy in Canter (1970d). Lee, T .R. (1970) Do we need a theory? Canter (1970d) •

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?ayne, I. (1970) Pupillary response to archi,ectural stimuli in Canter (1970d) 0

Sanoff, Ho (1968) Techniques of Evaluation for Designers Raleigh: Design Research Laboratory, School of Design, North Carolina State University 0

Stringer, Po (1970) Architecture, Psychology: whatever the name, the game's the same in Canter (1970d) 0

Thiel, Po (1961) A sequence-experience notation for architectural and urban space Town PI anning Review 32, 33- 5 2. Wools, RoM. (1970) The assessment of room friendliness in Canter (l970d). Wools, R.M. and Canter, D.V. (1970) The effect of the meaning of buildings on behaviour Applied Ergonomics, 1, 3, 144-150. Vielhauer, J.A. (1965) The development of a semantic scale for the description of the physical environment PhD thesis: Louisiana State University.