Towards a user-centred theory of the built environment

Vischer, Jacqueline C.

doi:10.1080/09613210801936472

Cited by 187 publications

(202 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Nevertheless, it has demonstrated a clear need for understanding human responses to tall buildings and its surrounding urban habitat; the erection of very tall buildings should not be driven entirely by technological advances. Engineers, behavioral scientists, and design researchers (e.g., Hartkopf and Loftness, 1999;Veitch, 2008;Vischer, 2008;Lamb and Kwok, 2017) recognize that buildings should be designed for occupant comfort, work performance, and well-being. There is a great potential for contributions from various fields of social and behavioral sciences.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Living and Working in Tall Buildings: Satisfaction and Perceived Benefits and Concerns of Occupants

2017

Front. Built Environ.

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In the past few decades, tall buildings of 30 to over 100 storeys are becoming more common in modern cities around the world, especially in Asia and the Middle East, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Extensive research has focused on the technical aspects of erecting tall buildings, yet few recent studies have been conducted to examine occupants' experiences and responses. To assess what is already known about living and working in these tall buildings and to provide future directions for research, this article reviews recent empirical studies on occupants' perception of tall buildings, and physiological and psychological experiences in relation to its tallness. Occupants perceive better view, less noise, and better air quality as benefits for living and working on higher floors than on lower floors. However, occupants also expressed concerns about height, difficulty with vertical transportation, strong wind, and escape in case of fire. Note that the methodologies used in many of the self-reported studies are relatively weak. Given the scarcity of research regarding human responses, this mini-review aims to encourage behavioral scientists to collaborate with building science researchers to advance our understanding of human-environmental relations in this new habitat.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Living and Working in Tall Buildings: Satisfaction and Perceived Benefits and Concerns of Occupants

2017

Front. Built Environ.

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“…Environmental psychology is an obvious gateway to user experience within built environment research [74]; however, ambiguous yet persistent experience of interior is not necessarily covered to suit the building design community to put into practice. While there are research efficiencies and validities associated with psychology's science methods, if variable selection is undertaken without designer input, this reductionist approach of coding or quantising indoors is of limited use.…”

Section: An Argument For Sequential Convergence Of Research Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Occupancy is seen as 'familiarity' with an interior due to '…the close proximity of people, objects, and space' [77] (p. 3). It is also concerned with the temporality of designed spaces, particularly the need to adjust infrastructure to occupants as their needs change [2,74], leading to shorter lifecycles for interior architecture than architecture.…”

Section: Interior Architecture-a Brief View From the Theoretical Schomentioning

confidence: 99%

Translating across Disciplines: On Coding Interior Architecture Theory to Advance Complex Indoor Environment Quality

Pearce

2018

Buildings

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Abstract:While indoor environment quality (IEQ) measurement is an established process, it omits the pleasure of interior environments, possibly due to its perceived subjectivity in the context of objective productivity and profitability. Given the significant commercial interior design industry, which engages with the complexity of indoor habitation, there exists an opportunity to expand the scope of IEQ appraisal through inclusion of the interior architecture discipline as an IEQ stakeholder. This theoretical paper reframes existing building appraisal as convergent methods that are contingent on the discipline and audience, and proposes a sequential mixed methods research process that allows subjective and objective research methods integration. Drawing on the interior architecture discipline, and its holistic 'interiority', a content analysis of selected theoretical texts identifies candidate quality components for future development and use in environment quality measurement. The intention of this process is to translate across the interior architecture and architectural science disciplines by coding interior architecture perspectives into possible measurable variables. These broader candidate variables would likely be more inclusive of the lived experience and agency of occupants of interior spaces. Furthermore, they offer the possibility for extended complex indoor environment quality data for future use in advanced statistics.

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“…However, it is often more informative to characterize complex systems phenomenologically [28,29]. One of the most important features in such a characterizations is observer relativity.…”

Section: Complexitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The built environment as a complex system

Cloete¹

2017

Int. J. DNE

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The lack of a recognized theoretical disciplinary base for the built environment has been noted on a number of occasions. The field holds the promise of being interdisciplinary, but requires the development of a common epistemological construct. It has been proposed that a unified theory of the built environment may require that the built environment be understood as a complex social-ecological system. It will argued, however, that the challenge is more fundamental; that development of an adequate model would require convergence of the ideas of interdisciplinarity and complexity, with concomitant epistemological as well as ontological considerations. The application of whole-system theory to the built environment is explored with special reference to the identification of boundaries and modularities in different domains and the implications for a taxonomy of the built environment. The development of a theoretical base for the field as a whole would facilitate axiological decision-making in the built environment and also inform both curriculum design and research strategy in the subject area.

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Towards a user-centred theory of the built environment

Cited by 187 publications

References 13 publications

Living and Working in Tall Buildings: Satisfaction and Perceived Benefits and Concerns of Occupants

Living and Working in Tall Buildings: Satisfaction and Perceived Benefits and Concerns of Occupants

Translating across Disciplines: On Coding Interior Architecture Theory to Advance Complex Indoor Environment Quality

The built environment as a complex system

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