Decision-Making Processes, Choice Behavior, and Environmental Design: Conceptual Issues and Problems of Application

Abstract

Environmental design is a conscious process in which the environment is shaped to meet certain objectives. In manipulating physical attributes of the environment, the environmental designer influences the aesthetic, functional, economic, and social dimensions of the built environment. Designs will either directly or indirectly exert impacts on the spatial and social behavior of individuals. The architect or urban planner may therefore wish to assess the likely effects of design alternatives on human behaviors when addressing the problem of ex ante evaluation of different design options. Traditional designers employed rules of thumb and did not spend much time explicitly analyzing and predicting human behavior. However, especially in the field of urban planning, the development of public demands for higher environmental standards, the ever-increasing complexity of urban planning problems, and the process of democratization have all stimulated application of models for predicting the consequences of design alternatives on human behavior. This tendency has perhaps been most strong in the context of spatial behavior. In the Netherlands, for example, it has become common practice, especially in such problem contexts as transportation, retailing, recreation, public facilities, and housing, to base design decisions in part on analyses of human behavior. The present chapter focuses exclusively on a particular type of decision making and action, namely spatial choice behavior. The extensive research on this type of decision making is not well known to environmental psychologists but there may be a great potential for integrating it with the more traditional research on environmental cognition and assessment. The chapter is organized as follows. First, the problem context is sketched in more depth. A characteristic of research on spatial choice is the development of mathematical-statistical models for predicting choice behavior. The following section outlines a general conceptual framework for the different modeling approaches, which are then briefly explained. A separate section is then devoted to a discussion of the role of the physical environment in spatial choice behavior. The chapter concludes with a discussion of a number of problems research on spatial choice faces. It is contended that the solution to some of these problems may benefit from a broader psychological approach similar to the one taken in environmental psychology.