Structuring the Environmental Experience Design Research Framework through Selected Aged Care Facility Data Analyses in Victoria

Nan Ma,Hing-Wah Chau,Masa Noguchi,Jin Zhou

doi:10.3390/su9122172

Abstract

Humans relate to the living environment physically and psychologically. Environmental psychology has a rich developed history while experience design emerged recently in the industrial design domain. Nonetheless, these approaches have barely been merged, understood or implemented in architectural design practices. This study explored the correlation between experience design and environmental psychology. Moreover, it conducted literature reviews on theories about emotion, user experience design, experience design and environmental psychology, followed by the analyses of spatial settings and environmental quality data of a selected aged care facility in Victoria, Australia, as a case study. Accordingly, this study led to proposing a research framework on environmental experience design (EXD). It can be defined as a deliberate attempt that affiliates experience design and environmental psychology with creation of the built environment that should accommodate user needs and demands. The EXD research framework proposed in this study was tailored for transforming related design functions into the solutions that contribute to improving the built environment for user health and wellbeing.

Highlights

Architectural design encompasses a complex thought process that leads to realising the configurations and spaces with due consideration of market needs and demands
Many existing aged care facilities today barely accommodate the concept of age-friendliness
This study led to the creation of a new terminology “environmental experience design” (EXD) and the research framework through literature reviews of theories on emotion, user experience design, experience design and environmental psychology, as well as studies on existing spatial settings and indoor environmental quality of an aged care facility selected in Victoria, Australia

Summary

Introduction

Architectural design encompasses a complex thought process that leads to realising the configurations and spaces with due consideration of market needs and demands. The personalisation in the design development may need to be taken into account Design decision makers, such as architects, are responsible for creating the physical and psychological comfortable built environment. Crozier defines emotion as “conceptions of meaningful responses to life experience” [1]. He mentions that “it is a person’s experience of the world rather than the world’s objective properties that counts” [1]. McCarthy and Wright annotate that “emotions are qualities of particular experiences” [2,3] In some manners, these statements support the importance of design for built environment that needs to accommodate proper user experiences

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