REVIEWS

Book Review
— Christina Amaral-kim

Unacknowledged Connections: Design’s role in responding to the feeling, thinking human in Welcome to Your World 

Over the past few years, I’ve begun to recognize the impact the built environment has on people from a functional perspective; that is, how it affects our ability to move about and access services based on our age, gender, ability, racial and cultural background, and socioeconomic status. What I hadn’t considered until reading Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives was how human-made structures and systems influence our cognitive thinking (conscious and subconscious) and in turn influence our psychological and social wellbeing.

Materials, structural patterns, circulation routes -- these elements should be optimized for functionality, shouldn’t they? Yes, if humankind’s purpose is productivity. But the response changes if we take a more humanistic perspective. “A well-designed, properly constructed environment,” says author Sarah Williams Goldhagen, “meaningfully conveys to each of us that our human presence, not just our productive labor, credit card, or mortgage check, is valued.”[1] In that case, materials should be chosen not just for durability, but for how curious minds will interact with them; and routes should be designed not just to carry things efficiently from point A to point B, but to encourage enriching encounters along the way. Framing the built environment as a set of ever-changing external stimuli, the book’s teachings can be categorized into three follow-up stages -- sensation, reaction, and response -- that tell the story of the interaction between design and human experience.

SENSATION. Materials, Goldhagen explains, present stimuli that engage or exclude our various senses. Of those senses, sight is given preferential treatment, and has been since the dawn of the written word.[2] The construction manufacturing industry, responding to the ‘back to nature’ trend while keeping cost efficiency at the forefront, has been producing at a large scale materials that resemble natural ones, pleasing the eye while leaving the other senses unsatisfied, even mistreated.[3] Restaurants going for a ‘modern look’ decide, at the expense of the ears, to line their interiors with hard surfaces like brick and iron. The natural wood scent and soft echoes we experience when treading the pedestrian walkways scattered throughout the city of Calgary engage our non-visual senses in a gentle, inviting way, incomparable with a wood veneer. 

Having learned (and mentally filed away) the concept of the homunculus in high school biology class, I was tickled to come across it in Welcome to Your World. The homunculus is an anatomical map in which the size of each body part is dictated by the amount of sensory receptors (and hence brain power) located in that part. Goldhagen asserts that the world is designed allocentrically; i.e., to accommodate the proportions of an average human body (which we might see on a typical anatomical map) alongside other objects in space. If we were to instead design the world egocentrically, considering our relationship to those objects and how we might interact with them, it might be more compatible with our full human experience.[4] Given the homuncular size of the human tongue, envision a world in which we were invited to taste surfaces; responding to the powerful sensitivity of our hands, imagine museum exhibits with pieces all intended to be touched! While these ideas might be impractical for sanitary reasons (and perhaps even off-putting during a pandemic like this one), they are valuable seeds of thought, inviting us to imagine a society that is more accommodating to the multisensory human experience. 

REACTION.  Closely following sensations are thoughts and/or emotions that constitute our internal reactions to the built environment. Welcome to Your World points to recent psychological research that supports how “[o]ur emotions are enmeshed in and intermeshed with our bodies,”[5] paralleling a teaching in the Vipassana style of meditation that identifies sensations and our reactions to them (both positive and negative) as the cause of our suffering.[6] Sometimes the reaction is subtle, like the safety that students might feel in a “soft” classroom (e.g., one that has cushioned, modular seating, carpeting, and task lighting) as opposed to a conventional one designed in the 20th century. [7,8] Other times the reaction is quite noticeable. When a lovely stroll is interrupted by a discontinued sidewalk, an exasperated “Why?” might come to mind, followed by a begrudging decision to either cross the road (if possible) or to brace oneself for traveling on the same strip as the cars. Sustainable mobility expert Gil Penalosa declares that a city that prioritizes its roadways at the expense of its sidewalks sends an implicit message of inferiority to the people who use sidewalks.[9] Instead of fear and resentment, we need to start designing spaces that elicit feelings of safety and inclusion, for all lived experiences, because design certainly has that ability.

Think of a memory that has been top of mind lately. Can you picture the setting? Better yet, can you recall the memory without any ties to the place (i.e., only what was done, said, or felt)? Researchers at the intersection of neuroscience and art attribute the prominence of place in our memories to the proximity of the memory and spatial navigation processes in our brains.[10] Goldhagen describes the built environment’s ability to permeate our thoughts and establish itself as a psychological architecture: “Far from being a backdrop [...], the world we build constructs the literal, actual scaffolding we use to cognitively construct ourselves as people [...].”[11] This theory is reason enough to look beyond functions of shelter and movement and to begin designing with more complex human needs, such as emotional wellbeing, in mind.

RESPONSE. Our internal reactions to the environment manifest externally in our words and behaviours. When meeting strangers, for example, the setting influences our impression of them long past that moment. It also affects our decision-making process and, subsequently, the consequences. Psychology researchers in human interaction found that a person is more likely to perceive a stranger as kind and generous (i.e., “warm” traits) while holding a hot cup of coffee than while holding an iced coffee.[12] Similarly, a person is more willing to compromise while sitting in a cushioned chair than in a hard one.[13]

Skepticism toward these notions is natural; it is unnerving to think that small physical comforts or discomforts can control how we relate to people. Consider this: a whole field of study -- environmental psychology -- exists to examine and validate the magnitude of influence our surroundings have on our being. One of the founders, Roger Barker, made the striking discovery that “they could better predict a child’s conduct at a given time by specifying [their] environment and its action setting” (i.e., the activities that the space lends itself to) “than they could by delving into [their] individual, psychological profile.”[14] This means that for a child with ADHD, for instance, the message that a space communicates to them (through its design and arrangement) is more likely to drive how that child behaves than the ADHD itself. For a society that is so keen on diagnosing and treating individuals based on their personal history, this revelation -- that we’re more susceptible to outside influence than we might think -- is humbling. It begs the question: how do we design a world that responds appropriately to, rather than inhibits, the breadth of human ability?

CALL TO ACTION  Welcome to Your World is both a revelation and a request. Piece by piece, spanning the array of senses, emotions, thoughts, and behaviours, it unearths the unacknowledged connection of place to the human experience. With a powerful move, the author asserts that design professionals and citizens alike “cling to the invalidated notion that design is […] a matter of taste rather than of urgent public welfare.”[15]  Whether we’re professionals who envision and construct spaces, or residents and visitors who engage with those spaces, we are urged to challenge the status quo – a world idolizing sight, utility, and productive labour, and instead insist on design from the perspective of a feeling, thinking human being, acknowledging the nuances of lived experience. Designing in this way, we can finally achieve a world that supports rather than hinders our individual and collective wellbeing.

References:

[1] Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017), xxiv.

[2] Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Chichester, Great Britain: Wiley-Academy, 2005), 24, quoted in Goldhagen, Welcome to Your World, 16.

[3] Goldhagen, 105, 158.

[4] Goldhagen, 95.

[5] Goldhagen, 61.

[6] William Hart, The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation as Taught by S.N. Goenka (Onalaska, Washington: Pariyatti Publishing, 1987), 87.

[7] C. Kenneth Tanner, “Effects of School Design on Student Outcomes,” Journal of Educational Administration v. 47 no. 3 (2009), 381:399, quoted in Goldhagen, 10.

[8] Rotraut Walden (Ed.), Schools for the Future: Design Proposals from Architectural Psychology (New York: Springer, 2015), 1-10, quoted in Goldhagen, 10.

[9] Gil Penalosa, “Creating Healthy and Vibrant Cities,” January 30, 2019, Gleason Works Auditorium, Rochester, New York, USA, MP3, 1:05:28, https://archive.org/details/01GilPenalosaReshapingRochesterLecture/01+Gil+Penalosa+-+Reshaping+Rochester+-+Lecture.mp3. 

[10] Eric R. Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 281-95, quoted in Goldhagen, 84.

[11] Goldhagen, 84.

[12] Lawrence E. Williams & John A. Bargh, “Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth,” Science v. 322 no. 5901 (2008), 606-7, quoted in Goldhagen, 162.

[13] Goldhagen, 162.

[14] Roger Barker, Ecological Psychology: Concepts and Methods for Studying the Environment of Human Behavior (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1968), quoted in Goldhagen, 196-197.

[15] Goldhagen, 272.

Christina Amaral-Kim is an emerging writer with an interest in design's human experience who is based in Calgary.