Environmental Psychology

Definition

Environmental psychology names the field that arose when psychologists "became almost fashionable" (Broadbent, 1973) in taking "a specialist interest in environmental research and design" — the application of psychological method to the built environment's effects on people and of psychological knowledge to design. In Broadbent's framing it is the human-science wing of the empiricist re-emergence in architecture: the discipline charged with finding out what people actually want, against a sociology that (in Cohn-Bendit's critique) had sold itself to management and sought only "the adaptation of the worker to his work."

Key Claims

The 1960s–70s turn. "In the 1960s there has been an increasing amount of traffic" between the human sciences and environmental design; general surveys by Craik (1970) and Proshansky, Ittelson and Rivlin (1970); conference infrastructures at Dalandhui (Canter 1970), Kingston (Honikman 1971) and the Environmental Design Research Association.
The political motive. The entry of human scientists into environmental research was "largely… political, starting with a generalized concern for the environment": against industrial sociology's worker-adaptation, environmental design offered the chance of "trying genuinely to find out what people want rather than manipulating them to accept what is offered."
The caution. Many human sciences, psychology included, were "still embryo sciences, anxious above all to establish their respectability as true sciences," with practitioners "far more anxious to demonstrate their grasp of a methodology than to produce results which are usable in design."
The housing uptake. Ingrid Gehl's Bo-miljø (1971) environmental psychology grounded the user's needs in the Norwegian user-participation experiments (Røe) — the field's direct route into the wiki's participation and everyday-life materials.

Key Thinkers

Geoffrey Broadbent — the field's 1973 surveyor and critic: motivation, surveys, and the embryo-science caution.
David Canter (not yet paged — see log) — the conference infrastructure (Dalandhui 1970) and the field's UK institutionalization.
Ingrid Gehl (not yet paged — see log) — Bo-miljø (1971), the environmental-psychological grounding of user needs in housing research.

Empirical Methods — the broader methodological register environmental psychology belongs to.
Ergonomics — the physiological neighbour: standards for the body by controlled experiment.
User Participation — the design-political programme the field's findings fed.
Environmental Aesthetics — the aesthetic wing of the environment-facing turn.
Semantic Differential / Repertory Grid — the field's meaning-measurement techniques as inventoried in Broadbent 1980.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

Design in Architecture, ch. 4 (Broadbent 1973) — the founding survey: "it has become almost fashionable for psychologists and sociologists to take a specialist interest in environmental research and design"; the Cohn-Bendit motive; the Craik and Proshansky–Ittelson–Rivlin surveys; the embryo-science verdict.
Architectural Objects and Their Design as a Subject for Semiotic Studies (Broadbent 1980) — the field's empirical inventory within the semiotic frame: building-performance research (Pilkington Research Unit, Liverpool; Building Performance Research Unit, Strathclyde; EDRA); Osgood's Semantic Differential with Hershberger's, Acking's and Honikman's scales (semantic-differential); Kelley's Repertory Grid adapted by Honikman, its subject-generated constructs ("inoppressive/oppressive, spacious/crowded, informal/formal, fireplace/no fireplace, books/no books") answering the experimenter-scales objection (repertory-grid); the "fundamental problem" that preference findings cannot prescribe what to build (the preferred form would "become so boring that people no longer preferred it"); and the techniques' real use — measuring agreement between architect and client (Abel's construct studies).
The Construction of a Suburb (Røe 2015) — the field's housing uptake: "its theoretical fuel came from social scientists and psychologists, notably Ingrid Gehl's (1971) environmental psychology" (p. 542) in the Skjettenbyen user-participation experiment. See taet-lav.

Open Questions

Did environmental psychology escape Broadbent's caution, or did the field reproduce the pattern — data collected "without really stopping to think what their analyses are for"? The wiki's participation materials (paternalistic flexibility in Skjettenbyen) suggest the caution was warranted.
What is the field's relation to the phenomenological wing of the wiki (environmental-aesthetics, atmosphere) — rival empiricism, or complementary registers of the same turn?
Stub — requires fuller treatment of the field's canonical works (Craik 1970; Proshansky, Ittelson & Rivlin 1970; Canter) and its later history (post-occupancy evaluation, evidence-based design).