Abstract of a color processor inside the human brain.
Makes me wonder about how well we express color.
Image: Frank Bonilla Abstracts.tv | Flickr

How do you, as an architect, get to the bottom of what your occupants really need and want? Do you do this mostly be talking with them? Presenting different architectural design schemes to see which one they like best? Or do you study their behavior to understand what moves them with regard to the things that cannot be expressed by mere words?

I recently came across this quote that I thought might be an interesting place to begin a discussion about environmental psychology for architects:

“Research shows that only 5% of what the average person thinks can be expressed verbally. […] The other 95% is hidden deep within the subconscious.”

– Click here to read the article.

If the above statistic is true, then how do you as a designer wrap your head around the other 95% underlying what your occupants really want? Also, how can you increase the chances of creating a design that will, in fact, work — adding behavioral, emotional and intellectual response to what goes into making an architecture work functionally successful?

Five Techniques to Leverage Your Architectural Design Efforts

The following are five tips to help you, as an architect, incorporate key architectural psychology design principles while you design. These can be great starting points to shift your mindset — and can especially be coupled with your programming efforts: Read more

Image: Royal Ontario Museum | wvs | Flickr

Architectural psychology can be described as a branch of environmental or ecological psychology. This deals with the psychological processes of the interaction between man and his environment, as for example spatial perception, spatial thinking, orientation behaviour, or spatial experience, territorial behaviour, living requirements and satisfaction, local identity. (1)

When an occupant experiences a building, they immediately become involved in an array of overlapping processes that all contribute to their experience — architectural psychology focuses on such connections and can be applied to all building types.

A GOOD PLACE TO START

After my last post entitled Environmental Psychology: What Every Architect Should Ask Themselves, I received various questions from readers wanting to learn more. So, I began to look in the “not-so-usual” places. And then I came across this site at Read more