Directions in Person-Environment Research and Practice (Routledge Revivals)

Jack Nasar, Wolfgang F. E. Preiser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134876211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

First published in 1999, this book presents a fresh and diverse set of perspectives representing key directions of research and practice in the field of environmental design research. Leading researchers in various areas of person-environment research, such as privacy, children's environment, post-occupancy evaluation, environmental cognition, environmental aesthetics, crime prevention, housing and environmental protection and environmental design present what they consider their best work. The book argues for the value of a multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to problem-solving and outlines many important directions for methods, research and practice.

Part One
Theory on the Use of Space

1
The Place of Architectural Factors in Behavioral Theories of Privacy

JOHN ARCHEA*

Abstract

Although much of the recent concern for privacy as a central issue in the study of interpersonal behavior has arisen within the area of environmental psychology, the environment presented in this literature tends to lack enduring properties which set it apart from the behavior to which it is presumably related. By contrasty a model of the environment is proposed which is sensitive to physical properties which are independent of normative and symbolic associations imposed by tradition. This model indicates how the selection of one’s location and orientation within an architecturally bounded setting can affect both the acquisition of information about surrounding activities and the abilities of others to take notice of one*s own behavior. Within this framework selective conspicuousness is suggested as the chief means of privacy regulation. Selective conspicuousness involves a trade off between the environmental and behavioral options available for concealing or disclosing information about oneself with the physical environment presenting certain initial conditions upon which behavior is contingent.

Much of the research interest in privacy as a central aspect of interpersonal behavior has arisen within the area of environmental psychology. While the environment is often discussed at great length in these treatments of privacy, it is not always clear what is being referred to when the term “environment” is used. The notion of aphysical or architectural entity is implicit in the frequent attempts to state the design implications of privacy research (Altman, 1974, 1975; Proshansky, et al., 1971). Yet most research on privacy considers the environment solely in terms of the normative or symbolic qualities superimposed upon it by its inhabitants (Altman, 1974, 1975; Boslsley, 1976; Laufer, Proshansky, & Wolfe, 1973). The demarcation between the environment as a physical entity and the environment as a set of normative or symbolic associations has not been made explicit (see Levy, 1976; Moore, 1976; Willems & Campbell, 1976).

Conceptualizing the environment

The most elaborate treatment of the environment by an environmental or social psychologist concerned with privacy has been Altman’s (1974, 1975) account of clothing, personal space, and territoriality as privacy-regulating mechanisms. He conceptualizes privacy as the key linkage between these three aspects of the environment and verbal or paraverbal behavior. He also conceptualizes these three mechanisms as successively more remote layers of the self. By intentionally confounding the environment with these extensions of one’s being and personality, Altman has beclouded the notion of an environment that stands apart from the self. As privacy-regulating mechanisms these three manifestations of the environment are always present when and where the self is present. If, like one’s vocabulary or knowledge, these mechanisms are coextensive with one’s person, then how are they to be differentiated from that person? More importantly, by what logic do they become aspects of the environment? Altman’s position that his complex model suits the complex relationships he seeks to explain begs the question—particularly when he offers his model as a source of guidance for architects (Altman, 1975).Other notions of the environment as something that evokes or sustains a privacy experience (Laufer et al., 1971) or as a prop for the expression of individuality (Bossley, 1976) present similar problems. The environment thus conceived has no existential status independent of the uses to which it is put. This is analogous to the fictitious nineteenth century social scientist’s view of the steam engine as something that is at once the emancipator and the enslaver of the working class. This is one view of what a steam engine can do, but this is not what a steam engine is. The environment similarly construed, has circumstantial attributes and mediating consequences but no enduring properties.

While most environmental psychologists regard the environment as an unavoidable factor in the study of privacy, few seem to separate it from established notions of behavior. Most treatments are analogous to the early physicists’ treatment of ether phlogiston as hypothetical place holders for the unexplained variance in prevailing theories. Like its historical counterpart the environmental psychologists’ ethereal environment is empirically evasive and conceptually vague.

As alternatives to these behavior-centered notions of the environment, consider Canter and Kenny’s (1975) view of the environment as a set of locations or places, each differing in their access to information, or Margulis’s view of the environment as an information flow network (Margulis, Note 1). Here the environment begins to stand apart from the behavior which occurs within it. It has an existence that precedes and survives the respective arrivals and departures of the people who use it. Instead of being treated as a medium, the environment assumes the characteristics of a variable (Michelson, 1970). Still, the Canter and Kenny and the Margulis formulations are too sketchy to link the personal experience or regulation of privacy to specific environmental variables without further elaboration. Such elaboration will require a conceptualization of the environment that is not encumbered by current models of behavior. The quest for such a model of the environment may have to extend well beyond the traditional boundaries of psychology or the other behavioral sciences.

This article proposes a model of the environment that not only might be useful in conceptualizing privacy and other forms of interpersonal behavior, but that is also independent of the normative and symbolic associations with which tradition and the behavioral sciences have encumbered it. It begins with an explication of the physical properties of the architectural environment followed by a sketch of the behaviorally relevant attributes of the environment so defined. From these attributes, the role of the physical environment in the presentation of information about the self and in the experience of privacy will be developed. It should be noted that the purpose of this analysis is not to design environments but to more fully comprehend interpersonal behavior.

Properties and attributes

The starting point for explicating the relationships between environment and behavior is the recognition that such an analysis is not necessarily a logical extension of the traditional concepts and methods of psychology or the other behavioral sciences. The point is underscored by noting that the major unifying principle behind those conceptual and methodological pursuits has been the notion that the environment is a source of error which must be experimentally or statistically controlled in order to preserve the scientific integrity of behavioral constructs (Archea, 1974, 1975a). Instead of expanding accepted notions of interpersonal behavior to encompass the physical environment, our task should be to reconceptualize the nature of the physical environment so that the relationships between it and human behavior can be fully elaborated. A thorough consideration of this basic task must precede the analysis of specific environment-behavior concepts like privacy. Such a fundamental reassessment calls for a fresh consideration of the properties and attributes of the physical environment and of human behavior itself.

Properties are those intrinsic, defining characteristics of a thing or a class of things that make it what it is. Properties are always present, even if they are not fully understood or utilized by those who construe a thing in a particular way. Something’s color, density, tensile or compressive strength, bilateral symmetry, opposable handedness, and binocular vision are all properties. They impose limits on what things can do.

Attributes are those extrinsic, relational characteristics of things or classes of things that relate them to other things for specific purposes. Attributes are contingent upon what things do in relation other things. The concern is with functions, rather than essences. Efficiency, flammability, hazardousness, visibility, intelligence, and competence are all attributes. They link things to contexts. In effect they are the performance characteristics of the situations created when things come together in time and space.

Whereas properties provide a fairly objective set of constraints from which all other characteristics of things derive a part of their existential status, attributes are only conventions. The qualities of attributes are functions of both the nature of the relationships which they characterize and the intentions of those who find such characterizations useful.

In most analyses, privacy is considered to be a relational characteristic, or attribute, of a selected class of interpersonal situations. While the place-related or environmental aspects of these situations remain implicit in most theoretical treatments (Altman, 1974, 1975; Laufer et al., 1971; Proshansky et al., 1970), there is no justification for leaving these aspects any less explicit or empirically accessible than the person-related or behavioral aspects with which behavioral scientists are so much more familiar. Situations consist of a series of interrelated activities or events which occur within a series of physically and temporally bounded settings. As an attribute of a class of situations, privacy should be considered only in terms of the interrelated constraints which both physical and human properties impose upon interpersonal encounters. Each set of properties presents a necessary condition for the analysis of privacy, but it is their interrelationships which provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for such an analysis. This represents a sharp departure from previous efforts of many environmental psychologists to conceptualize the environment as a higher-order attribute of behavior, thereby endowing it and most situations with limitations that are exclusively human rather than physical.

Part of the problem of objectifying the environmental aspects of privacy may stem from the fact that the issue straddles intellectual communities as divergent in their traditions, objectives and methods as the behavioral sciences and the design professions (Archea, 1975a, 1975b). Although architecture is the field most commonly associated with environmental variables, it has not developed a research tradition that requires the kinds of intersubjectivity shared constructs or theories that psychologists are accustomed to using. Despite an architectural literature that is peppered with stimulating historical and philosophical insights which link privacy to the subdivision of spaces within buildings (Chermayeff & Alexander, 1965; Giedion, 1948; Mumford, 1938; Neutra, 1954) the only attributes of the physical environment for which architects have established explicit conventions are those most related to building fabrication and durability. In addressing attributes related to building occupancy or use, the designer’s vocabulary remains metaphorical and autobiographical.

In conceptualizing the behavior-related attributes of the physical environment we are left somewhere between the architects’ inclination to define them subjectively and intuitively and the psychologists’ inclination to derive them from previously established models of environment-free behavior. The fact that we presently are able to explicate the behavioral aspects of things like privacy with much more precision than the environmental aspects is little more than an artifact of a much longer scientific tradition in the behavioral sciences than in the design professions. If a commitment to precise definition and measurement had historically favored the environmental side of the coin, we now might be trying to untangle a working understanding of behavior from the heights of kitchen cabinets and the widths of exits.

Information fields

The task of explicating the behavior-related attributes of physical environments necessarily falls upon those who presume that interpersonal behavior is related to the setting in which it occurs. In this section, a general framework for conceptualizing social situations is proposed (also see Archea, 1974). The influence among others, of theoretical geographers Hagerstrand (1967) and Pred (1967) and of the sociologist Goffman (1963, 1971) will be apparent.

The framework begins with the notion that each person is the center of a dynamic field of information surrounding events and activities to which his or her behavior is a continuous adjustment. As ones’ ability to monitor surrounding activities increases, so does one’s awareness of emerging behavioral opportunities. Similarly, as the likelihood of being monitored by others increases, so does the person’s accountability for his or her own behavior. Thus, the regulation of interpersonal behavior is influenced by the possibilities for monitoring the behavior of others (access) and by the possibilities that others can monitor one’s own behavior (exposure).

Even though all sensory modalities are involved in this process, information conveyed visually is the most effective in governing one’s participation in an ongoing situation. In physically bounded settings, the potentials for seeing others (visual access) and for being seen by them (visual exposure) will vary as functions of the positions of walls and other visual barriers. In this manner, the spatial organization of the surrounding environments mediates the range of behavioral options and obligations which are apparent to those within the setting. The crux of this thesis is the notion that the arrangement of the physical environment regulates the distribution of the information upon which all interpersonal behavior depends.

From this presumptive notion, several auxiliary propositions follow. First, as situations change over time, access to and exposure from places where social events could develop will have as great an effect on the regulation of one’s behavior as access to or exposure from people who happen to occupy particular places at particular points in time. This suggests that doors, comers and other places in the environment where new information first impinges on a situation will have special behavioral significance. Second, according to their immediate intentions, persons can arrange ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Reflections on Man-Environment Relations
• Part One Theory on the Use of Space
• Part Two Design and Planning Process
• Part Three Psychological Factors
• Part Four Housing and Environmental Planning
• Epilogue: A Pioneer in Many Ways, Not All Intended
• Index