Environmental aesthetic design: Identifying and achieving desired environmental effects, particularly “image” and “atmosphere”

Abstract

Environmental aesthetic design is the process of determining aesthetic aspects of an environment still to be built. Aesthetic matters weigh heavily in the world of design and in the decisions of building designers, particularly architects. Yet, apart from its use within the specialized literature, the word aesthetic may mean whatever the user chooses it to mean. For the purposes of this paper an aesthetic effect of an environment is assumed to be a particular subjective quality that a designer may wish to give to, and a subjective response experienced by those who use, that environment. The paper proposes a simple procedure by which designers may establish aesthetic programmes (or briefs) for the “atmospheres” of environments and achieve their desired effects. The same procedure may be used to create a desired “image”.