420 Environmental Psychology
environmental psychologists seeking to meet this challenge
and address what some have considered to be an application
gap within environmental psychology (i.e., the gap between
the generation of general principles and on-the-ground ad-
vice of direct use to practitioners).
The Environment as Context
One of the shortcomings of so much psychological research
is that it treats the environment simply as a value-free back-
drop to human activity and a stage upon which we act out our
lives. In essence, the environment is regarded as noise. It is
seen as expedient in psychological investigations and experi-
ments to remove or reduce as much extraneous noise as
possible that will affect the purity of our results. This is un-
derstandable and desirable in many situations, but when it
comes to understanding human perceptions, attitudes, and
behaviors in real-world settings, the environment is a critical
factor that needs to be taken into account.
A paper presented at a recent environmental psychology
conference reported on an investigation of children’s class-
room design preferences. The study was undertaken by means
of showing the children photographs of different classroom
layouts. There were three principal methodological flaws that
illustrate well the issue of the role and importance of environ-
mental context in psychology. First, the photographs included
neither adults nor children. In other words, the photographs
did not illustrate or indicate how the environment was actu-
ally beingusedby either children or adults. When the re-
searcher was asked why children and adults were excluded
from the photographs, the response was that they would have
been a distraction. This is another variant of the failing iden-
tified in the previous paragraph. In this case, people are
treated as noise and become environmental objects. It is as-
sumed that if we can get people to rate environments prefer-
entially without those environments being contaminated with
people, we will arrive at a purer measure of the impact of the
environment on human preferences.
The second flaw with this study was that all the pho-
tographs were taken at adult height, thereby providing an
adult perspective on the environment even though children’s
perceptions and preferences were being sought. Finally, all
the photographs were taken from an adult point of view (e.g.,
the framing, focus, what was included and excluded) as if the
environment is visually and symbolically neutral. In other
words, the researcher thought that taking photographs of the
classrooms could provide an objective and impartial view of
the environment. If the photographs had been taken by the
children from their own perspective, the photographs might
have come to mean very different things to the children
and brought about a very different evaluation. The environ-
ment provides us with opportunities and constraints—sets of
affordances—that we can choose to draw upon (Gibson,
1979). Of course, not all children will perceive the same
affordances in a single environment, nor will similar environ-
ments generate the same perceptions and evaluations in a sin-
gle child (Wohlwill & Heft, 1987).
It is a characteristic feature of environmental psychology
that in any environmental transaction attention should focus
on the user of the environment as much as on the environ-
ment itself. For example, as it is not possible to understand
the architecture and spatial layout of a church, mosque, or
synagogue without reference to the liturgical precepts that in-
fluenced their design, so it is no less possible to understand
any landscape without reference to the different social, eco-
nomic, and political systems and ideologies that inform them.
One might well imagine, for example, a school landscape
that looks extremely tidy, well kempt, with clear demarcation
of spaces, producing a controlled and undifferentiated envi-
ronment with easy surveillance, and with learning and other
activities taking place in predetermined spaces. Such a de-
signed environment reflects a traditional view of the passive,
empty learner waiting for educational input. If one now
imagines a school landscape that appears on the surface to be
more haphazard and not so well ordered, unkempt with long
grass, soft or even no edges between activities, less easy sur-
veillance, and no obvious places for learning specific curricu-
lum subjects, then this would seem to be antithetic to learning
and education. However, if one switches to another model of
the child—the child as a stimulus-seeking learner—then the
sterile, formal, and rigid landscape just described would
seem like an inappropriate place for learning. On the other
hand, providing an unstructured, environmentally diverse set
of landscapes would seem to be an ideal place for learning,
encouraging children to seek out the stimulation that they
need for learning and development. Reading the environment
in terms of the assumptions it makes about the user is in-
structive. Understanding and designing the environment for
human activity can be achieved only when both the environ-
ment and the user are considered together as one transaction.
The environmental setting is not a neutral and value-free
space; it is culture bound. It is constantly conveying mean-
ings and messages and is an essential part of human func-
tioning and an integral part of human action. As Getzels
(1975) writes, “Our vision of human nature finds expression
in the buildings we construct, and these constructions in turn
do their silent yet irresistible work of telling us who we are
and what we must do” (p. 12). The environment embodies the
social and cultural values of those who inhabit it. Some psy-
chologists argue that we need only focus on people because