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Designing for people or ball-bearings?
TZ WISOXX
Designing for people or ball-bearings? Jonathan D Sime School of Architecture, Portsmouth Polytechnic, King Henry Building, King Henry I Street, Portsmouth POI 2D Y, UK A distinction is made between two ~ypes of design: design for people or for baU-bearings. The latter is used as a metaphor to caricature designs which attempt to impose control over a building's users. Ball-bearing design implies the treatment of people as if they are nonthinking objects rather like the elements of a building structure. It arises out of a concentration on the form rather than the function of the building as experienced by the eventual occupants. The problems caused by too rigid an adherence to the framework of particular disciplines are discussed; in particular, the rigid boundary between a psychology concerned exclusively with people and an architecture concerned with physical form. The role of design is seen as one of breaking down the boundaries between domains of knowledge, scientific research and architecture, so that more equal attention is given to people and the buildings they use. Recent criticisms of environmental psychology are discussed, together with the issue of 'control' of building users. The concept of control links the architectural design doctrines of functionalism (form follows function) and architectural determinism (function follows form). These expressions reflect a simplistic view of building users--the ball bearings in the 'building machine'. Keywords: architecture, functionalism, determinism, design philosophy, environmental psychology The expression 'designing for ball-bearings' is used in this paper to describe any building design which, in placing too much emphasis on the physical form, neglects the relationship the building's users are likely to have to the physical design. I regard ball bearing design as a useful metaphor for exploring differences in emphasis in design. These arise very much from the conventional boundaries that have been erected between a whole range of disciplines concerned with people and their physical surroundings. For me, 'designing for people' is an approach which 'involves' the eventual building user in the design process, draws on research that has been carried out on people and their physical surroundings, and recognizes that users require a measure of personal control over and involvement in the design and use of their environment. It is architecture which has as its primary concern, not simply the physical form of a building, but the fit between people and buildings. It aims to create 'places', or at least to provide a setting which people can
Vol 6 No 3 July 1 9 8 5
personalize and relate to. In the past, this has been described as 'fitting the form to the function' of a building. However terms such as 'function' or 'user requirements' may prove too simplistic, for they imply neat packages of behaviour or needs to which a building form can be fitted. What one is moving towards is a more flexible interactive model of design, involving not simply designing a physical form but understanding that this is a context for particular patterns of experiences, social relationships and activities. The designer may have a role to play not only in the design of the building but also in its use after construction. 'Designing for ball-bearings' implies, in contrast, a strict engineering or technological-fLx solution to a design problem which tends to remove control from the occupants. It is a design which concentrates on the properties of geometric spaces and the visual aspects of design without paying sufficient attention to the experiences and behaviour of people who will inhabit the spaces. It involves a 'distancing' of the eventual building
0142-694X/85/03163-06 $03.00 © 1985 Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd
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user from the design 'expert'. It assumes architectural determinism, i.e. the ability of the physical environment to bring about changes in people, or an awareness and sensitivity on their part to a novel design. In my opinion, conventional divisions between subjects such as psychology, architecture and engineering set up conflicting rules, assumptions and patterns of emphasis by which to assess building designs. These 'subject rules' put too much emphasis either on people or on the physical form. It is these divisions or boundaries between subjects that I want to address and that, I believe, 'design' as a field of knowledge can help to transcend. I do not believe, as some do, in making a rigid distinction between artistic and scientific approaches to design. It is misleading, if not dangerous, to assume an inherent difference between the research and design activity, or to characterize science as essentially analytic ('finding out the nature of what exists') and design as constructive ('inventing things of value which do not exist') j. In my opinion, design must draw on existing knowledge if it is to be accessible to its recipients. Existing knowledge and creative projections into the future are inextricably linked. Both the 'definition of the problem' and 'creation of the solution' should be as much a feature of a scientific researcher's as a designer's responsibility and armoury of skills. As an environmental psychologist working in a school of architecture, I am concerned to explore my own particular role in relation to design. Recently described as an 'architectural design researcher '2, I offer a perspective of someone who is not a designer by training. I am interested in 'design' as a vehicle for breaking down boundaries between what I regard as entrenched views of architects and psychologists. The following discussion is directed towards the metaphoric 'defence wall' between social science research and architecture. Architecture does not have a clear tradition of academic research, certainly in a scientific mould. It is reluctant to step over the boundaries of its own discipline and to pay equal attention to the physical form of a building and the people this form is to house. Other disciplines such as psychology seem to me to be equally guilty of ignoring the physical environment which we all inhabit and experience. An important role for design as a domain of knowledge, and means of turning ideas or concepts into physical artefacts, is as an interdisciplinary 'think tank' in which people should not be too protective about their own particular 'niche'.
DESIGN AS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ACTIVITY The subject of design could be likened to the type of integrated as opposed to collective educational curriculum that traditionally demarcates one domain of knowledge from another. Thompson 3 traces what happens when the boundaries of a collective curriculum collapse. In a collective curriculum each subject is taught without any reference to another; it is self-sufficient and complete
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in itself. In the integrated curriculum, as he remarks. 'the emphasis is placed not on the autonomy oi ~hc various subjects but on the connections between t h e m . It is in its ability to forge links between subjects thai there could be a useful role for design. Drawing on the writings of Bernstein, Thompson adopts a horticultural metaphor in which the land is dotted with academic estates, each with their boundary fences. The boundary of the estate can be changed by the actor moving a ring fence to 'cultivate' (i.e. obtain research funds and support within) an adjacent area d.c. either neutral waste land or across the territory of another discipline). Should more and more people invest time and energy in what were formerly forbidden areas, the actual ideology of the parent subject can be undermined and reach a point of rapid collapse. The feeling that I am less and less like the psychologist I was originally trained to be, and more and more like an anthropologist venturing across the fence from the inner sanctuary of one subject's culture into another (psychology into architecture), has led me to question the nature of the 'applicability and credibility' gap between research and architecture. The applicability gap is between the form in which research results are presented in other disciplines and the ease with which they can be applied in design. The credibility gap is that between what, on the one hand, the architect believes to be true by virtue of the belief system and the assumptions of architecture as a discipline and what, on the other hand, empirical research within the framework of another discipline shows 4. A serious communication gap exists between people with artistic and scientific predilections and those more specifically with visual and semantic modes of communication 5. Greater integration is necessary. Unfortunately, the researcher or designer, scientist or artist, social scientist or engineer, defensively protects his respective disciplinary territory. A number of people are calling for a transdisciplinary approach to research and design in which the emphasis is on 'total building performance '6,7.
ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURE It is now some 20 years since the contribution that social science research could make to architecture began to be voiced by a number of researchers writing in architectural and design journals. The necessity of directing greater attention in building design to the building user was emphasized 8'9. There was the hope that 'social science techniques' could help to feed the architect with basic design requirements. The intention was not to replace the architect. As Langdon wrote9: 'Those techniques should not dictate but serve the architect's function ~ . he remains the master of the form and conceptual whole.' By the early 1970s, the scattering of social scientists interested in the design field had grown far enough for an area of knowledge within the boundary fence of psychology to put down its roots: environmental psychology.
DESIGN STUDIES
Psychologists venturing into this area have essentially felt that the physical environment has a far greater part to play in people's lives than more mainstream psychology recognizes. Early setders were quick to 'cultivate' a terrain with a major theme for attention: the relationship between people and the physical form of buildings. To extend the analogy, 'buildings' to date had come to represent a 'no man's land' in which attention had been given to the building form at the expense of its occupants. In his paper in 1970 Canter wrote m (p 299): 'No coherent framework has been developed which presents both the user and building in the same picture . . . development of a valid and meaningful framework should be a joint enterprise between designers and social scientists.' The relationship between the psychologist and architect was never considered as likely to be an easy one, and was characterised at that time by Lee as being in the early stages of courtship n. Some 15-20 years later it is worth considering how much progress has been made in breaking down the boundaries between disciplines. Unfortunately, while there has been progress in expanding environmental psychology as a subdiscipline of psychology, there has been limited progress in actually feeding research into the design process. There has been limited involvement in architectural projects even by the most active of academic researchers 12. Recently, criticisms from beyond the boundary fence of the subject have been growing. Researchers coming from other disciplines, e.g. sociology and architecture, find it uncomfortable for aspects of people's relationship to the physical environment to be put under the label 'environmental psychology'. For them it seems obvious that cultural, political and historical features of people's relationship to the physical environment are being neglected in a subject area which starts with the individual as a point of reference. Some people, usually from an architectural background, argue that too much emphasis is put on research techniques and quantitative measurements, and that this stifles the creative aspects of design 13'14. Interestingly, there is a complementary tendency for those within environmental psychology to put the blame elsewhere for the gap between research in environmental psychology and design ~5. In my view, any reconciliation between a domain of knowledge essentially concerned with people (psychology) and buildings (architecture) has to come through a greater compromise and respect from people operating on either side of boundary fences, rather than adopting an antagonistic stance. Lipman and Harris ~6 have been vociferous in their criticisms of environmental psychology, suggesting that it is positivistic in its approach, it treats people as objects, it assumes that social interaction is governed by laws and that it is possible to use objective data to adjudicate in conflicts of value. They suggest that the relationship between people and the material world, rather than being unidirectional, is--on the contrary-interactive: 'People do not simply react to their physical environments, they endow them with meaning, they
Vol 6 No 3 July 1985
interpret and change them.' Unfortunately, such criticisms fail to take any account of clear changes within environmental and social psychology which have been taking place for some time in the direction Lipman and Harris would like to see 17. Moreover, to imply that the only thing to which psychology should be addressing itself is the distribution of access to building spaces seems to me to be an oversimplification of the complexity of factors involved in understanding how people relate to different environments. Undoubtedly, changes which have been taking place in psychology, through movements such as environmental psychology, have not been fast enough for its recent critics. It is clear that criticisms voiced about psychology as a research discipline shift the emphasis in the title of this paper onto the shoulders of researchers who, as much as designers, treat people metaphorically as objects. Conventional psychology has blissfully ignored the physical environment for much of its history. In this respect, environmental psychology has had a real contribution to make in alerting some psychologists, at least, to the physical environment which we all inhabit. The fact that standard textbooks on social psychology have begun to appear with a token chapter on environmental psychology shows that progress is slow. As someone convinced that people and the physical environment should not by definition be treated separately, I would prefer to see more integration of the physical environment within mainstream psychology. Every chapter should implicitly acknowledge that people's experiences and behaviour are physically situated. Paradoxically, as environmental psychology gains greater respect within psychologyIs it becomes less easy for it to relate to or overlap with the territory of architecture, The research fails to communicate in the area of middle ground between architecture and psychology which is concerned, not so much with the 'validity' of information, but with its relevance to the design process.
FUNCTIONALISM AND ARCHITECTURAL DETERMINISM A recent book of readings 2 highlights the nature of the gap between research on people and physical design. One of the clearest differences in the contributions is the degree of emphasis on the building form---or its function. The final editorial to the book suggests that architectural practice, education and research is 'in turmoil'. I would prefer to hope that there are signs that discussions are under way at the negotiating table. Greater agreement on the aims and content of design has to be achieved through people who, despite originating from different parent disciplines, are united in their view that an approach to design is required which pays equal attention to a building's function and form. The book of readings 2 is particularly interesting because of the marriage of different viewpoints. Still, there are teething problems. In particular, some authors prefer to develop a language of f o r m 19 which can apparently exist indepen-
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dently of function, or to concentrate on the structure of the finished building 2°. Others direct their attention to the question of how to 'model' or abstractly characterize the design process in a way which will • improve the standards of design • provide a platform for absorbing an ever-growing mass of research and technological information In my opinion, you cannot divorce the form from the function as many researchers and architectural critics seem to do, if not intentionally, by default. The term 'functionalism', characterized by the expression 'form follows function', has probably led to insufficient attention to the relationship between people and their physical environments. Despite being a justification this century for architecture tailoring itself to the building user, 'modern' architecture has often been characterized by 'form follows form', with one technical innovation after another in construction and building materials (such as glass and concrete) being the real catalysts behind the modern style. If buildings are 'machines to live in' we are the ball bearings or depersonalized cogs in the machine. As Sommer wrote 2~: Frank Lloyd Wright put forth the doctrine that form follows function, which became a useful antidote to needless ornamentation. Yet it is obvious that most of the concern with functionalism has been focused on form rather than function. It is as if the structure itself~harmony with the site, the integrity of the materials, the cohesiveness of the separate units, has become the function. Relatively little emphasis is placed on the activities taking place inside the structure. It is clear that in many respects a doctrine of architectural determinism, i.e. 'function is to follow form', rather than the other way round, has pervaded. To put this colloquially: 'We have ways of making people conform to our designs.'
CONTROLLING PEOPLE'S BEHAVIOUR: BALL-BEARING DESIGN A series of papers 22-24 have considered the issue of control of people's behaviour and social relations through the manipulation of space. Examples of occupancies, in which the architectural layout itself can be regarded as imposing a rigid control over the space to be occupied by different building users, include old people's homes, psychiatric hospitals, prisons, offices and schools. The issues of functionalism, architectural determinism and the linking concept of control are equally applicable to an area I have been Very involved in, research on behaviour in fires and escape route design. In this context, the question of what kind of human being one is designing for is pertinent. I would like to use the example of fires briefly to illustrate more clearly what I mean by one type of design for ball-bearings. In a paper concerned with the control of building use, Cooper 24 makes a distinction between two questions: Can architectural design be
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manipulated in order to control how people behave? Even if it can, should it? While he considers the second question primarily, both questions are obviously interrelated and important. The following discussion is more concerned with the first question. One of the main principles adopted in fire regulations in the UK for public buildings, (e.g. hotels over three storeys above ground floor) is that, in the event of a fire obstructing one route, an alternative escape route is available. This alternative escape route is conventionally designed to be used only in the event of an emergency. Recent research 25 suggests that people are more inclined to avoid this route since it is unfamiliar. Unfortunately, like much of the safety design for fires, therc is an emphasis on 'engineering' people's safety through the physical form of the building. Evident in the design solution is a design doctrine which Cooper 26 has recognized in the design guidance which accompanied the introduction of a building model in another area of design: the open-plan school. He suggests that there have been, on the one hand, a functionalist design doctrine ~'tbrm follows function') and, on the other hand, one of architectural determinism ('function follows form'). Open-plan school design can be viewed as a response to an educational philosophy and an attempt to advance this philosophy. There are strong parallels in the provision of emergency escape routes, for these are deemed in the building regulations and design guidance literature to be a logical response to the function of moving people to safety and a means, by virtue of their physical existence, of encouraging people to move in a particular direction 25'27. Unfortunately, neither the open-plan school nor conventional emergency escape route design has involved a properly integrated programme of research on the building users and design of the building. In seeking a strict engineering solution to fire satety, people are equated with 'non-thinking' moving objects in motion, e.g. 'the flow of corks in a channel of water 'e~ or 'a granular mass '29. Emphasis is placed on restricting people's access to information about a fire in its early stages in buildings such as department stores. This 'physical-science model' of human automatons, propelling themselves--rather like snooker balls--towards an emergency escape route, is justified by an assumption that people are most likely to be 'panicking '27. The assumption is that, since people who 'panic' are no longer in control, control should, therefore be imposed upon them. In fact, recent research shows that the typical newspaper scenario of panic, used to justify 'why' an emergency escape was not used in a fire tragedy, invariably fails to take into account the perspective of the actors in the situation. Attempting to head in a familiar direction, under circumstances of delayed and incomplete information about a fire's development, may only be 'irrational' from the perspective of an independent observer after the event 27. Just as there is a mismatch between people viewing an event from different perspectives, there is miscommunication and misunderstanding between experts from
DESIGN STUDIES
different disciplines. Cooper has pointed out the dangers of assuming one can rely on a 'technological fix' such as a centralized heating system in nondomestic property, for this offers building users no access to the controls 23. More recently he has remarked on the threat from micro-electronics technology used in an attempt to control a building's use 24. We could be moving away from an era of functionalist and architecturally deterministic innocence, characterized by a remark allegedly made first by Winston Churchill: 'We shape our buildings and our buildings shape us.' Something more sinister may be happening now with Orwellian overtones--in which the building expert is in danger of attempting to control the user. However, I do not regard any tendency to design for people as ball-bearings solely as an issue of beliefs, principles and values concerning the distribution of access to particular spaces. Despite recent criticisms of quantitative research, it is clear that in the area of fire research it is insufficient to concentrate solely on the qualitative issues of control. Statistical research on the patterns of human behaviour in fires is an essential complement to overall issues of who has access to what. In this respect, I regard a number of recent criticisms of environmental psychology to be only partially justified.
CONCLUSION What I want to stress is the danger of designing m spite of rather than for the building user. Ellis 3° has made a distinction between an 'outside-in' and 'inside-out' psychology. An 'outside-in' psychology adopts a mechanistic, deterministic model of human beings rather like our model of ball bearing design. Emphasis is put on people's behaviour. In contrast, an 'inside-out' psychology treats a person's understanding of situations as the primary reference point. Here, research and design involve negotiation and transaction between designer and user. The design researcher has a mediating role between different parties (e.g. management and workers). Ellis recommends greater involvement by architects in the use of, and changes made to, a building after it has been constructed. A building is not just bricks and mortar. A more equitable balance has to be gained between the myriad of social, psychological, political, economic and architectural issues involved in the life of a building. In attempting to collapse the boundary of research and design, it should be recognized that the fmished building is as much a 'conjecture' which has to be assessed through systematic evaluation studies, as an initial design premise, plan drawing or small-scale model of a building. In Thompson's terms 3~ the range of disciplines involved in studying or designing environments could be characterized by 'plural rationalities'. Rather than assuming there can be one unique rationale, each viewpoint is essential to the viability--the continued functioning---of the whole. A discipline is limited by the physiological, social and cultural limits or bounds of
Vol 6 No 3 July 1985
what can be coped with in information gathering, processing and decision making. A feature of 'bounded rationalities' is that widely divergent views may seem perfectly rational from the perspective of each party. What one wants to avoid is the imposition of one rationale upon another. In our case it would be a strictly engineering, ball bearing approach to design which does not accommodate other social, psychological and cultural factors. To cast off the specialist straitjackets which have been handed down to us ever since the demise of Renaissance man--the artist and the scientist---design should aim to encourage the exchange and negotiation of information and viewpoints both between different types of building user and between different types of expert involved in research on people--environment relations and architecture. Design research has an important reconciliatory role to play, in which the emphasis is on developing a human scale of design and set of integrated research and design principles to help achieve it. In this way, design could evolve not only as a technical craft, but also as a domain of knowledge and endeavour which is uniquely interdisciplinary in its focus.
REFERENCES
1 Gregory, S A The design method, Butterworth, London, UK (1966) 2 PoweR, J A, Cooper, I and Lera, S (eds) Designing for building utilisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984)
3 Thompson, M Rubbish theory Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK (1979) 4 Sime, J D 'Social research and design: the nature of appraisal' in Powell, J A, Cooper, J and Lera, S (eds) Designing for building utilisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984) 50strander, E R 'The visual--semantic communication gap: a model and some implications for collaboration between architects and behavioural scientists' Man--Environ. Syst. Vol 4 No 1 (1974) pp 47-53 6 Zeisel, J Inquiry by design Brook/Cole, Monterey, CA, USA (1981) Zeisel, J 'Inquiry by design--total building performance model' in Powell, J A, Cooper, I and Lera, S (eds) Designing for building utilisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984) 8 Wells, B W P 'The psycho-social influence of building environment'Build. Sci. No 1 (1965) pp 153-165
9 Langdon, F J 'The social and physical environment: a social scientist's view' RIBA ft. (October 1966) pp 460-464 10 Canter, D 'Need for a theory of function in architecture' Archit. ft. (4 February 1970) pp 299-302
11 Lee, J 'Psychology and architectural determinism (part 1)' Archit. J. (4 August 1971) pp 253-262 12 Canter, D 'Psychology and environmental design' in Canter, S and Canter, D (eds) Psychology in practice:
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perspectives on professional psychology Chapter 15 Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK (1982) 13 Lawrence, R J 'Architecture and behavioural research: a critical review' Des. Stud. Vol 4 No 2 (1983) pp 76-83 14 Noschis, K 'Architects and psychology' Architecture et Comportement (Architecture and Behaviour) Vol 1 (1981) pp 149-164 15 Canter, D 'Beyond Building ufilisation' in Powell, J A, Cooper I and Lera, S (eds) Designing for building utilisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984) 16 Lipman, A and Harris, H 'Environmental psychology: a sterile research enterprise?' Built Environment Vol 6 No 1 (1980)
17 Harre, R and Secord, P F The explanation of social behaviour Blackwell, Oxford, UK (1972) 18 Canter, D 'Putting situations in their place: foundations for a bridge between social and environmental psychology' in Furnham, A (ed.) Social behaviour in context Allyn and Bacon, New York, USA (1983) 19 Hillier, B, Hanson, J and Peponis, J 'What do we mean by building function? in Powell, J A, Cooper I and Lera, S (eds) Designing for building utilisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984)
20 Hawkes, D 'Research for design' in Powell, J A, Cooper I and Lera, S (eds) Designing for building utilisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984) 21 Sommer, Personal space: the behavioural basis for design Pentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA (1969)
22 Harris, H and Lipman, A 'Architecture and knowledge: control or understanding' Architecture et Comportement (Architecture and Behaviour) Vol 1 (1981) pp 135-147
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23 Cooper, I 'Occupant control over energy consumption m non-domestic premises: a question of perspective' in Stafford, B (ed) Consumers, buildings and energy Conf. and Seminar Paper No 7 Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Brimingham, U K (1983) pp 114-131
24 Cooper, I 'Architectural design, micro-electronics technology and the control of building use' in Powell, J A, Cooper I and Lera, S (eds) Designing Jbr building utilisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984) 25 Sime, J D 'Research on exit choice behaviour: implications for escape route design' in Joiner, D, Brimilcombe, G, Daish, J, Gray, J and Kernohan, D (eds) Con. on People and Physical Environment Research (PAPER), Wellington, New Zealand, 8-11 June 1983 Paper 23 Hasselberg Government Printer, NZ Ministry of Works, Wellington, New Zealand (1983) pp 319-330 26 Cooper, I 'The politics of education and architectural design: the instructive example of British primary education' Br. Educ. Res. J. Vol 7 No 2 (1981) pp 125-136 27 Sime, J D 'The concept of panic' in Canter, D (ed) Fires and human behaviour Chapter 5 Wiley, New York, USA (1980) pp 63-81 28 Phillips, B G Escape from fire: methods and requirements E & F Spon, London, UK (1951)
29 Peschl, I A S Z 'Flow capacity of door openings in panic situations' Bouw Vol 26 No 2 (1971) pp 62-67 30 Ellis, P 'Making buildings work' in Powell, J A, Cooper I and Lera, S (eds) Designing for building utilisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984) 31 Thompson, I 'Mole versus Corb: an anthropologist's meta view of designing for building utilisation' hi Powell, J A, Cooper I and Lera S (eds) Designing for building utitisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984)
DESIGN STUDIES
Designing for people or ball-bearings? Jonathan D Sime School of Architecture, Portsmouth Polytechnic, King Henry Building, King Henry I Street, Portsmouth POI 2D Y, UK A distinction is made between two ~ypes of design: design for people or for baU-bearings. The latter is used as a metaphor to caricature designs which attempt to impose control over a building's users. Ball-bearing design implies the treatment of people as if they are nonthinking objects rather like the elements of a building structure. It arises out of a concentration on the form rather than the function of the building as experienced by the eventual occupants. The problems caused by too rigid an adherence to the framework of particular disciplines are discussed; in particular, the rigid boundary between a psychology concerned exclusively with people and an architecture concerned with physical form. The role of design is seen as one of breaking down the boundaries between domains of knowledge, scientific research and architecture, so that more equal attention is given to people and the buildings they use. Recent criticisms of environmental psychology are discussed, together with the issue of 'control' of building users. The concept of control links the architectural design doctrines of functionalism (form follows function) and architectural determinism (function follows form). These expressions reflect a simplistic view of building users--the ball bearings in the 'building machine'. Keywords: architecture, functionalism, determinism, design philosophy, environmental psychology The expression 'designing for ball-bearings' is used in this paper to describe any building design which, in placing too much emphasis on the physical form, neglects the relationship the building's users are likely to have to the physical design. I regard ball bearing design as a useful metaphor for exploring differences in emphasis in design. These arise very much from the conventional boundaries that have been erected between a whole range of disciplines concerned with people and their physical surroundings. For me, 'designing for people' is an approach which 'involves' the eventual building user in the design process, draws on research that has been carried out on people and their physical surroundings, and recognizes that users require a measure of personal control over and involvement in the design and use of their environment. It is architecture which has as its primary concern, not simply the physical form of a building, but the fit between people and buildings. It aims to create 'places', or at least to provide a setting which people can
Vol 6 No 3 July 1 9 8 5
personalize and relate to. In the past, this has been described as 'fitting the form to the function' of a building. However terms such as 'function' or 'user requirements' may prove too simplistic, for they imply neat packages of behaviour or needs to which a building form can be fitted. What one is moving towards is a more flexible interactive model of design, involving not simply designing a physical form but understanding that this is a context for particular patterns of experiences, social relationships and activities. The designer may have a role to play not only in the design of the building but also in its use after construction. 'Designing for ball-bearings' implies, in contrast, a strict engineering or technological-fLx solution to a design problem which tends to remove control from the occupants. It is a design which concentrates on the properties of geometric spaces and the visual aspects of design without paying sufficient attention to the experiences and behaviour of people who will inhabit the spaces. It involves a 'distancing' of the eventual building
0142-694X/85/03163-06 $03.00 © 1985 Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd
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user from the design 'expert'. It assumes architectural determinism, i.e. the ability of the physical environment to bring about changes in people, or an awareness and sensitivity on their part to a novel design. In my opinion, conventional divisions between subjects such as psychology, architecture and engineering set up conflicting rules, assumptions and patterns of emphasis by which to assess building designs. These 'subject rules' put too much emphasis either on people or on the physical form. It is these divisions or boundaries between subjects that I want to address and that, I believe, 'design' as a field of knowledge can help to transcend. I do not believe, as some do, in making a rigid distinction between artistic and scientific approaches to design. It is misleading, if not dangerous, to assume an inherent difference between the research and design activity, or to characterize science as essentially analytic ('finding out the nature of what exists') and design as constructive ('inventing things of value which do not exist') j. In my opinion, design must draw on existing knowledge if it is to be accessible to its recipients. Existing knowledge and creative projections into the future are inextricably linked. Both the 'definition of the problem' and 'creation of the solution' should be as much a feature of a scientific researcher's as a designer's responsibility and armoury of skills. As an environmental psychologist working in a school of architecture, I am concerned to explore my own particular role in relation to design. Recently described as an 'architectural design researcher '2, I offer a perspective of someone who is not a designer by training. I am interested in 'design' as a vehicle for breaking down boundaries between what I regard as entrenched views of architects and psychologists. The following discussion is directed towards the metaphoric 'defence wall' between social science research and architecture. Architecture does not have a clear tradition of academic research, certainly in a scientific mould. It is reluctant to step over the boundaries of its own discipline and to pay equal attention to the physical form of a building and the people this form is to house. Other disciplines such as psychology seem to me to be equally guilty of ignoring the physical environment which we all inhabit and experience. An important role for design as a domain of knowledge, and means of turning ideas or concepts into physical artefacts, is as an interdisciplinary 'think tank' in which people should not be too protective about their own particular 'niche'.
DESIGN AS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ACTIVITY The subject of design could be likened to the type of integrated as opposed to collective educational curriculum that traditionally demarcates one domain of knowledge from another. Thompson 3 traces what happens when the boundaries of a collective curriculum collapse. In a collective curriculum each subject is taught without any reference to another; it is self-sufficient and complete
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in itself. In the integrated curriculum, as he remarks. 'the emphasis is placed not on the autonomy oi ~hc various subjects but on the connections between t h e m . It is in its ability to forge links between subjects thai there could be a useful role for design. Drawing on the writings of Bernstein, Thompson adopts a horticultural metaphor in which the land is dotted with academic estates, each with their boundary fences. The boundary of the estate can be changed by the actor moving a ring fence to 'cultivate' (i.e. obtain research funds and support within) an adjacent area d.c. either neutral waste land or across the territory of another discipline). Should more and more people invest time and energy in what were formerly forbidden areas, the actual ideology of the parent subject can be undermined and reach a point of rapid collapse. The feeling that I am less and less like the psychologist I was originally trained to be, and more and more like an anthropologist venturing across the fence from the inner sanctuary of one subject's culture into another (psychology into architecture), has led me to question the nature of the 'applicability and credibility' gap between research and architecture. The applicability gap is between the form in which research results are presented in other disciplines and the ease with which they can be applied in design. The credibility gap is that between what, on the one hand, the architect believes to be true by virtue of the belief system and the assumptions of architecture as a discipline and what, on the other hand, empirical research within the framework of another discipline shows 4. A serious communication gap exists between people with artistic and scientific predilections and those more specifically with visual and semantic modes of communication 5. Greater integration is necessary. Unfortunately, the researcher or designer, scientist or artist, social scientist or engineer, defensively protects his respective disciplinary territory. A number of people are calling for a transdisciplinary approach to research and design in which the emphasis is on 'total building performance '6,7.
ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURE It is now some 20 years since the contribution that social science research could make to architecture began to be voiced by a number of researchers writing in architectural and design journals. The necessity of directing greater attention in building design to the building user was emphasized 8'9. There was the hope that 'social science techniques' could help to feed the architect with basic design requirements. The intention was not to replace the architect. As Langdon wrote9: 'Those techniques should not dictate but serve the architect's function ~ . he remains the master of the form and conceptual whole.' By the early 1970s, the scattering of social scientists interested in the design field had grown far enough for an area of knowledge within the boundary fence of psychology to put down its roots: environmental psychology.
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Psychologists venturing into this area have essentially felt that the physical environment has a far greater part to play in people's lives than more mainstream psychology recognizes. Early setders were quick to 'cultivate' a terrain with a major theme for attention: the relationship between people and the physical form of buildings. To extend the analogy, 'buildings' to date had come to represent a 'no man's land' in which attention had been given to the building form at the expense of its occupants. In his paper in 1970 Canter wrote m (p 299): 'No coherent framework has been developed which presents both the user and building in the same picture . . . development of a valid and meaningful framework should be a joint enterprise between designers and social scientists.' The relationship between the psychologist and architect was never considered as likely to be an easy one, and was characterised at that time by Lee as being in the early stages of courtship n. Some 15-20 years later it is worth considering how much progress has been made in breaking down the boundaries between disciplines. Unfortunately, while there has been progress in expanding environmental psychology as a subdiscipline of psychology, there has been limited progress in actually feeding research into the design process. There has been limited involvement in architectural projects even by the most active of academic researchers 12. Recently, criticisms from beyond the boundary fence of the subject have been growing. Researchers coming from other disciplines, e.g. sociology and architecture, find it uncomfortable for aspects of people's relationship to the physical environment to be put under the label 'environmental psychology'. For them it seems obvious that cultural, political and historical features of people's relationship to the physical environment are being neglected in a subject area which starts with the individual as a point of reference. Some people, usually from an architectural background, argue that too much emphasis is put on research techniques and quantitative measurements, and that this stifles the creative aspects of design 13'14. Interestingly, there is a complementary tendency for those within environmental psychology to put the blame elsewhere for the gap between research in environmental psychology and design ~5. In my view, any reconciliation between a domain of knowledge essentially concerned with people (psychology) and buildings (architecture) has to come through a greater compromise and respect from people operating on either side of boundary fences, rather than adopting an antagonistic stance. Lipman and Harris ~6 have been vociferous in their criticisms of environmental psychology, suggesting that it is positivistic in its approach, it treats people as objects, it assumes that social interaction is governed by laws and that it is possible to use objective data to adjudicate in conflicts of value. They suggest that the relationship between people and the material world, rather than being unidirectional, is--on the contrary-interactive: 'People do not simply react to their physical environments, they endow them with meaning, they
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interpret and change them.' Unfortunately, such criticisms fail to take any account of clear changes within environmental and social psychology which have been taking place for some time in the direction Lipman and Harris would like to see 17. Moreover, to imply that the only thing to which psychology should be addressing itself is the distribution of access to building spaces seems to me to be an oversimplification of the complexity of factors involved in understanding how people relate to different environments. Undoubtedly, changes which have been taking place in psychology, through movements such as environmental psychology, have not been fast enough for its recent critics. It is clear that criticisms voiced about psychology as a research discipline shift the emphasis in the title of this paper onto the shoulders of researchers who, as much as designers, treat people metaphorically as objects. Conventional psychology has blissfully ignored the physical environment for much of its history. In this respect, environmental psychology has had a real contribution to make in alerting some psychologists, at least, to the physical environment which we all inhabit. The fact that standard textbooks on social psychology have begun to appear with a token chapter on environmental psychology shows that progress is slow. As someone convinced that people and the physical environment should not by definition be treated separately, I would prefer to see more integration of the physical environment within mainstream psychology. Every chapter should implicitly acknowledge that people's experiences and behaviour are physically situated. Paradoxically, as environmental psychology gains greater respect within psychologyIs it becomes less easy for it to relate to or overlap with the territory of architecture, The research fails to communicate in the area of middle ground between architecture and psychology which is concerned, not so much with the 'validity' of information, but with its relevance to the design process.
FUNCTIONALISM AND ARCHITECTURAL DETERMINISM A recent book of readings 2 highlights the nature of the gap between research on people and physical design. One of the clearest differences in the contributions is the degree of emphasis on the building form---or its function. The final editorial to the book suggests that architectural practice, education and research is 'in turmoil'. I would prefer to hope that there are signs that discussions are under way at the negotiating table. Greater agreement on the aims and content of design has to be achieved through people who, despite originating from different parent disciplines, are united in their view that an approach to design is required which pays equal attention to a building's function and form. The book of readings 2 is particularly interesting because of the marriage of different viewpoints. Still, there are teething problems. In particular, some authors prefer to develop a language of f o r m 19 which can apparently exist indepen-
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dently of function, or to concentrate on the structure of the finished building 2°. Others direct their attention to the question of how to 'model' or abstractly characterize the design process in a way which will • improve the standards of design • provide a platform for absorbing an ever-growing mass of research and technological information In my opinion, you cannot divorce the form from the function as many researchers and architectural critics seem to do, if not intentionally, by default. The term 'functionalism', characterized by the expression 'form follows function', has probably led to insufficient attention to the relationship between people and their physical environments. Despite being a justification this century for architecture tailoring itself to the building user, 'modern' architecture has often been characterized by 'form follows form', with one technical innovation after another in construction and building materials (such as glass and concrete) being the real catalysts behind the modern style. If buildings are 'machines to live in' we are the ball bearings or depersonalized cogs in the machine. As Sommer wrote 2~: Frank Lloyd Wright put forth the doctrine that form follows function, which became a useful antidote to needless ornamentation. Yet it is obvious that most of the concern with functionalism has been focused on form rather than function. It is as if the structure itself~harmony with the site, the integrity of the materials, the cohesiveness of the separate units, has become the function. Relatively little emphasis is placed on the activities taking place inside the structure. It is clear that in many respects a doctrine of architectural determinism, i.e. 'function is to follow form', rather than the other way round, has pervaded. To put this colloquially: 'We have ways of making people conform to our designs.'
CONTROLLING PEOPLE'S BEHAVIOUR: BALL-BEARING DESIGN A series of papers 22-24 have considered the issue of control of people's behaviour and social relations through the manipulation of space. Examples of occupancies, in which the architectural layout itself can be regarded as imposing a rigid control over the space to be occupied by different building users, include old people's homes, psychiatric hospitals, prisons, offices and schools. The issues of functionalism, architectural determinism and the linking concept of control are equally applicable to an area I have been Very involved in, research on behaviour in fires and escape route design. In this context, the question of what kind of human being one is designing for is pertinent. I would like to use the example of fires briefly to illustrate more clearly what I mean by one type of design for ball-bearings. In a paper concerned with the control of building use, Cooper 24 makes a distinction between two questions: Can architectural design be
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manipulated in order to control how people behave? Even if it can, should it? While he considers the second question primarily, both questions are obviously interrelated and important. The following discussion is more concerned with the first question. One of the main principles adopted in fire regulations in the UK for public buildings, (e.g. hotels over three storeys above ground floor) is that, in the event of a fire obstructing one route, an alternative escape route is available. This alternative escape route is conventionally designed to be used only in the event of an emergency. Recent research 25 suggests that people are more inclined to avoid this route since it is unfamiliar. Unfortunately, like much of the safety design for fires, therc is an emphasis on 'engineering' people's safety through the physical form of the building. Evident in the design solution is a design doctrine which Cooper 26 has recognized in the design guidance which accompanied the introduction of a building model in another area of design: the open-plan school. He suggests that there have been, on the one hand, a functionalist design doctrine ~'tbrm follows function') and, on the other hand, one of architectural determinism ('function follows form'). Open-plan school design can be viewed as a response to an educational philosophy and an attempt to advance this philosophy. There are strong parallels in the provision of emergency escape routes, for these are deemed in the building regulations and design guidance literature to be a logical response to the function of moving people to safety and a means, by virtue of their physical existence, of encouraging people to move in a particular direction 25'27. Unfortunately, neither the open-plan school nor conventional emergency escape route design has involved a properly integrated programme of research on the building users and design of the building. In seeking a strict engineering solution to fire satety, people are equated with 'non-thinking' moving objects in motion, e.g. 'the flow of corks in a channel of water 'e~ or 'a granular mass '29. Emphasis is placed on restricting people's access to information about a fire in its early stages in buildings such as department stores. This 'physical-science model' of human automatons, propelling themselves--rather like snooker balls--towards an emergency escape route, is justified by an assumption that people are most likely to be 'panicking '27. The assumption is that, since people who 'panic' are no longer in control, control should, therefore be imposed upon them. In fact, recent research shows that the typical newspaper scenario of panic, used to justify 'why' an emergency escape was not used in a fire tragedy, invariably fails to take into account the perspective of the actors in the situation. Attempting to head in a familiar direction, under circumstances of delayed and incomplete information about a fire's development, may only be 'irrational' from the perspective of an independent observer after the event 27. Just as there is a mismatch between people viewing an event from different perspectives, there is miscommunication and misunderstanding between experts from
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different disciplines. Cooper has pointed out the dangers of assuming one can rely on a 'technological fix' such as a centralized heating system in nondomestic property, for this offers building users no access to the controls 23. More recently he has remarked on the threat from micro-electronics technology used in an attempt to control a building's use 24. We could be moving away from an era of functionalist and architecturally deterministic innocence, characterized by a remark allegedly made first by Winston Churchill: 'We shape our buildings and our buildings shape us.' Something more sinister may be happening now with Orwellian overtones--in which the building expert is in danger of attempting to control the user. However, I do not regard any tendency to design for people as ball-bearings solely as an issue of beliefs, principles and values concerning the distribution of access to particular spaces. Despite recent criticisms of quantitative research, it is clear that in the area of fire research it is insufficient to concentrate solely on the qualitative issues of control. Statistical research on the patterns of human behaviour in fires is an essential complement to overall issues of who has access to what. In this respect, I regard a number of recent criticisms of environmental psychology to be only partially justified.
CONCLUSION What I want to stress is the danger of designing m spite of rather than for the building user. Ellis 3° has made a distinction between an 'outside-in' and 'inside-out' psychology. An 'outside-in' psychology adopts a mechanistic, deterministic model of human beings rather like our model of ball bearing design. Emphasis is put on people's behaviour. In contrast, an 'inside-out' psychology treats a person's understanding of situations as the primary reference point. Here, research and design involve negotiation and transaction between designer and user. The design researcher has a mediating role between different parties (e.g. management and workers). Ellis recommends greater involvement by architects in the use of, and changes made to, a building after it has been constructed. A building is not just bricks and mortar. A more equitable balance has to be gained between the myriad of social, psychological, political, economic and architectural issues involved in the life of a building. In attempting to collapse the boundary of research and design, it should be recognized that the fmished building is as much a 'conjecture' which has to be assessed through systematic evaluation studies, as an initial design premise, plan drawing or small-scale model of a building. In Thompson's terms 3~ the range of disciplines involved in studying or designing environments could be characterized by 'plural rationalities'. Rather than assuming there can be one unique rationale, each viewpoint is essential to the viability--the continued functioning---of the whole. A discipline is limited by the physiological, social and cultural limits or bounds of
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what can be coped with in information gathering, processing and decision making. A feature of 'bounded rationalities' is that widely divergent views may seem perfectly rational from the perspective of each party. What one wants to avoid is the imposition of one rationale upon another. In our case it would be a strictly engineering, ball bearing approach to design which does not accommodate other social, psychological and cultural factors. To cast off the specialist straitjackets which have been handed down to us ever since the demise of Renaissance man--the artist and the scientist---design should aim to encourage the exchange and negotiation of information and viewpoints both between different types of building user and between different types of expert involved in research on people--environment relations and architecture. Design research has an important reconciliatory role to play, in which the emphasis is on developing a human scale of design and set of integrated research and design principles to help achieve it. In this way, design could evolve not only as a technical craft, but also as a domain of knowledge and endeavour which is uniquely interdisciplinary in its focus.
REFERENCES
1 Gregory, S A The design method, Butterworth, London, UK (1966) 2 PoweR, J A, Cooper, I and Lera, S (eds) Designing for building utilisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984)
3 Thompson, M Rubbish theory Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK (1979) 4 Sime, J D 'Social research and design: the nature of appraisal' in Powell, J A, Cooper, J and Lera, S (eds) Designing for building utilisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984) 50strander, E R 'The visual--semantic communication gap: a model and some implications for collaboration between architects and behavioural scientists' Man--Environ. Syst. Vol 4 No 1 (1974) pp 47-53 6 Zeisel, J Inquiry by design Brook/Cole, Monterey, CA, USA (1981) Zeisel, J 'Inquiry by design--total building performance model' in Powell, J A, Cooper, I and Lera, S (eds) Designing for building utilisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984) 8 Wells, B W P 'The psycho-social influence of building environment'Build. Sci. No 1 (1965) pp 153-165
9 Langdon, F J 'The social and physical environment: a social scientist's view' RIBA ft. (October 1966) pp 460-464 10 Canter, D 'Need for a theory of function in architecture' Archit. ft. (4 February 1970) pp 299-302
11 Lee, J 'Psychology and architectural determinism (part 1)' Archit. J. (4 August 1971) pp 253-262 12 Canter, D 'Psychology and environmental design' in Canter, S and Canter, D (eds) Psychology in practice:
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perspectives on professional psychology Chapter 15 Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK (1982) 13 Lawrence, R J 'Architecture and behavioural research: a critical review' Des. Stud. Vol 4 No 2 (1983) pp 76-83 14 Noschis, K 'Architects and psychology' Architecture et Comportement (Architecture and Behaviour) Vol 1 (1981) pp 149-164 15 Canter, D 'Beyond Building ufilisation' in Powell, J A, Cooper I and Lera, S (eds) Designing for building utilisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984) 16 Lipman, A and Harris, H 'Environmental psychology: a sterile research enterprise?' Built Environment Vol 6 No 1 (1980)
17 Harre, R and Secord, P F The explanation of social behaviour Blackwell, Oxford, UK (1972) 18 Canter, D 'Putting situations in their place: foundations for a bridge between social and environmental psychology' in Furnham, A (ed.) Social behaviour in context Allyn and Bacon, New York, USA (1983) 19 Hillier, B, Hanson, J and Peponis, J 'What do we mean by building function? in Powell, J A, Cooper I and Lera, S (eds) Designing for building utilisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984)
20 Hawkes, D 'Research for design' in Powell, J A, Cooper I and Lera, S (eds) Designing for building utilisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984) 21 Sommer, Personal space: the behavioural basis for design Pentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA (1969)
22 Harris, H and Lipman, A 'Architecture and knowledge: control or understanding' Architecture et Comportement (Architecture and Behaviour) Vol 1 (1981) pp 135-147
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23 Cooper, I 'Occupant control over energy consumption m non-domestic premises: a question of perspective' in Stafford, B (ed) Consumers, buildings and energy Conf. and Seminar Paper No 7 Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Brimingham, U K (1983) pp 114-131
24 Cooper, I 'Architectural design, micro-electronics technology and the control of building use' in Powell, J A, Cooper I and Lera, S (eds) Designing Jbr building utilisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984) 25 Sime, J D 'Research on exit choice behaviour: implications for escape route design' in Joiner, D, Brimilcombe, G, Daish, J, Gray, J and Kernohan, D (eds) Con. on People and Physical Environment Research (PAPER), Wellington, New Zealand, 8-11 June 1983 Paper 23 Hasselberg Government Printer, NZ Ministry of Works, Wellington, New Zealand (1983) pp 319-330 26 Cooper, I 'The politics of education and architectural design: the instructive example of British primary education' Br. Educ. Res. J. Vol 7 No 2 (1981) pp 125-136 27 Sime, J D 'The concept of panic' in Canter, D (ed) Fires and human behaviour Chapter 5 Wiley, New York, USA (1980) pp 63-81 28 Phillips, B G Escape from fire: methods and requirements E & F Spon, London, UK (1951)
29 Peschl, I A S Z 'Flow capacity of door openings in panic situations' Bouw Vol 26 No 2 (1971) pp 62-67 30 Ellis, P 'Making buildings work' in Powell, J A, Cooper I and Lera, S (eds) Designing for building utilisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984) 31 Thompson, I 'Mole versus Corb: an anthropologist's meta view of designing for building utilisation' hi Powell, J A, Cooper I and Lera S (eds) Designing for building utitisation E & F Spon, London, UK (1984)
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