Incorporating Environmental Psychology in Architectural Design Processes : creation of a Translation Tool based on Affordances

Sammanfattning: Considering the enormous investment society makes in developing and shaping the built environment, and the huge impacts that buildings have on people’s health and well-being, there is an urgent need to better understand how to design buildings for human welfare. In the realm of architectural practice, designers are increasingly met with demands to present evidence of how their designs perform from a user perspective. Evidence-based insights from the field of environmental psychology provide a wealth of empirically based knowledge on the relationships between people and the physical environment. However, even as calls for evidence-based design intensifies, there is a lack of clearly defined strategies for connecting findings from environmental psychology with the processes of architectural design. This indicates the existence of an archive of academic knowledge that is currently not being implemented to a satisfactory level in the creation and maintenance of the everyday physical environments in our societies. The overarching objective of this Master’s thesis has been to explore a way to bridge the gap between research from the field of environmental psychology and architectural design practice. As a means of investigation, a translation tool based on the concept of affordances, was developed and subsequently tested and evaluated, in a pilot study involving a design team within an architectural studio. The outcomes of this study indicate the relevance of such translation tools, but also a difficulty for them to work independently. However, the format of the pilot study as a facilitated workshop, where the architects under guidance could engage with knowledge from the field of environmental psychology, worked very well. This suggests that the facilitated workshop format holds considerable potential as a strategy for bridging the gap between the two fields.