The Policy Environment for Environment-Behavior Research

Abstract

Environmental design is commonly defined as arranging the forces of nature to achieve the purposes of humans. The constructions manifesting that order, in turn, influence subsequent human activities, including the initiation of the next set of purposes. Thus, structural designers must take cognizance of the gravitational force, whereas lighting designers live intimately with the psychobiology of vision. These physical forces (mechanical, electromagnetic, and thermal, among others; the involuntary physiological reflexes; and the regularities of psychophysical responses) are universal, or nearly so, in their effect. To ignore them invites disaster, literally. But designers and managers of environments who operate in culturally complex societies have had to deal with an additional set of forces that, although frequently encountered, are neither as universal in their incidence nor as uniform in their efficacy as the physical, physiological, and psychophysical factors. These newer forces, no less real because they are analytically less tractable, are the institutions and policies that mediate human purposes and human action in the creation and operation of the built environment. Although academic analyses of these forces are comparatively recent emergents in policy studies, written buildjng regulatory precedents may be traced as far as the Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1955–1913 b.c.e.). Present-day public policies are, as in ancient Babylon, instruments for achieving social purposes, on the one hand, and, on the other, boundaries limiting individual action.