Dr Paul Hanna

Senior Associate & Chartered Psychologist

Psychology is key to everything we build.

PEOPLE

Fresh perspectives

New voices of the built environment

We’ve all heard of it – and it’s now one of the most popular A-level and degree courses in the UK. But psychology has reached far beyond the walls of academia into popular TV shows and films, the press and, of course, the burgeoning market of self-help books, alongside many other avenues.

Still… what is a psychologist doing at an engineering consultancy? Don’t we already place people at the centre of our design process? Indeed, there’s no doubting that the human-centric approach puts people at the heart of decision-making in terms of air quality, lighting, aggregated comfort temperatures and so on, but there are ways in which psychology can add to and complement this valuable, ambitious work in these areas and more besides.

Low-lying fruit

Post-occupancy evaluations give us an insight into how buildings perform in the real-world setting, beyond the initial modelling, and offer an account of where things are or aren’t working. Often when things aren’t functioning as well as the simulations and modelling suggested, it is as a direct result of the people using the buildings. It is here that psychological understanding can offer us a better idea of how people might behave in the built environment at the planning and modelling stage. In addition, psychology can add to our post-occupancy evaluations by examining how people are engaging with and experiencing the built environment; what they are doing, what they are not doing, why they are behaving in such ways, what could be modified and what can be learnt for future projects.

Building people and communities

For years, psychology has studied the ways in which people interact with spaces and how those spaces shape, and potentially enrich, human lives. For example, there is extensive evidence that while community spaces (social clubs, sports facilities, myriad others) function outside of formal mental health care, often without an explicit focus on mental health, the environments and activities they offer can be extremely beneficial in terms of positive mental health. They add to a sense of being, belonging, identity, purpose and meaning, as well as social cohesion. So, in master planning, we have the opportunity not just to construct buildings but communities; to work with people from the start of the process to co-produce built environments with them rather than imposing environments on them.

In master planning, we have the opportunity not just to construct buildings but communities; to work with people from the start of the process to co-produce built environments with them rather than imposing environments on them.

Rethinking healthcare design and provision

Psychology can enable a rethink of healthcare settings which places the specific needs, aspirations, concerns and desires of patients, their carers, and staff at the heart of design and implementation. This can be co-produced to ensure that in addition to meeting clinical excellence requirements, there is a sense of connection, enhancing patient-staff interaction and leading to better health outcomes. It can offer up a range of designs with health and wellbeing benefits (e.g. biophilic design principles) for which there is psychological evidence – to enable collective decision-making on how each department might look. These sorts of insights can help us work with patients, carers and staff to think through how they engage with healthcare. They provide new understandings of the spaces and broader concepts within, e.g. shifting the perception of hospitals so that the thought of them does not bring up negative emotions. These can hinder people in a) presenting to services, or b) their experience if they do present (in short, if we dread a place, we will likely focus on the negative elements of that place when we experience it). We can offer a rethink of the healthcare facility in much the same way as the Alder Hey Hospital presents itself as a ’children’s health park’.

Psychology and sustainability

As highlighted above, actual building performance sometimes doesn’t match up to the performance suggested through the modelling process, and often it is human interaction with the space which causes this mismatch. Here, psychology can help us better understand why some people engage in sustainable behaviours, why others don’t and, perhaps more importantly, the techniques and interventions we can use to engage more people in sustainable behaviours and encourage them to act in ways that better align with our modelling.

Finally, psychologists have suggested that part of the reason for the high and much-publicised levels of anxiety and distress in everyday contemporary society is the result of our detachment from the natural world. We have extensive evidence for the benefits of engaging with nature in terms of positive individual mental health, as well as evidence that shows wellbeing enhancement for individuals who engage in pro-environmental practices and behaviours. Therefore, rather than seeing human-centric and planet-conscious concerns pulling us in different directions, psychological insights can help us to think about these concerns as intrinsically linked. Through such harmony we have the foundations for a truly sustainable future.

LET'S TALK

PaulHanna@hoarelea.com

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