Urban Ecology, 4 (1979) 151-159 151 0 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in The Netherlands

EXPERIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT: PERCEPTION OF ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY

H.M.C. SCHELLEKENS

Eschweilerhof 6, 5625 NP Eindhoven (The Netherlands)

ABSTRACT

Schellekens, H.M.C., 1979. Experience and environment: perception of environmental quality. Urban Ecol., 4: 151-159.

This article reviews two different approaches to the question about experience and the visual environment. In particular, the issue of the qualities of an adequate environ- ment is discussed and experimental data are presented that support the idea of the exis- tence of an individual and functional relationship between man and environment. Neisser’s

concept of “perceptual schema” and Gibson’s concept of “affordance” appear on the scene to explain why not everybody perceives the same meanings in the same environment.

Finally two hypothesized conditions are presented for an adequate environment that takes into account the individual character of users. These environmental conditions are the encouragement by the environment to use it for one’s own purposes, and the opportunity to discover personal meaningful uses of the environment.

INTRODUCTION

Two concepts will be the core of this contribution to the workshop about perception and the quality of the environment. These are “experience” and “quality”. Both concepts are rather vague, and in order to avoid vagueness it is necessary to describe them more precisely.

Experience “Experience” is a relational concept expressing the realization of the

interaction between the user of an environment and the environment itself. In a man-environment relationship at least three aspects are discernible, a reference aspect, an evaluation and an arousal aspect.

The reference aspect concerns the identification of the present environ- ment in terms of its resemblance to personally known environments. It re- flects the comparison of its appearance with the environments one already knows. The second aspect of experience is the evaluative one. It concerns the user’s opinion about or his attitude to the present environment. In some greater or lesser degree one always likes or dislikes the environment of which one is making use now. The third aspect, arousal, concerns the selection of objects and events in the present environment to which one is paying atten- tion. It reflects what is happening there to the user.

152

Often the term “experience” is accompanied by “subjective”. The mean- ing of this combination is probably to indicate that one’s feelings about a particular environment are not necessarily common to everyone. After all, the addition of “subjective” to “experience” is superfluous, because its counterpart is a non-existing entity. Experience is always and by definition “subjective”, in the sense of something belonging to someone.

“Subjective” is not the same as “non-observable” or “immeasurable”. If experience is conceived as the totality of the three aspects, reference, evalu- ation and arousal, then the opportunity is offered of observation and mea- surement. Reactions are observable and the reactions of two men are com- parable. Experience can for instance be measured with an instrument con- sisting of a series of bipolar rating scales, like a semantic differential, as is often done. However, one is measuring then verbal reactions of the user of an environment and the question can be raised whether these reactions are the most obvious and important ones to measure.

Quality The other central concept of this contribution is “quality of the environ-

ment”. The MAB Expert Panel on Project 13 (UNESCO, 1973) defines quali. ty as a wide range of considerations and variables, including the arrangement of man-made structures, the organization of social services, the availability of space for particular activities and the accessibility of areas of natural vege- tation and other areas. This description seems clear enough; it answers the questions of what is and is not in an environment and what it looks like. These questions are relatively simple. However, it becomes more difficult when one wants to know how the environment should look and what ele- ments it should contain in order to be an adequate environment. These questions have a completely different character; they are normative.

The question that will concern us here is about the conditions of good quality of an environment. A pragmatic approach to this question could be- gin with the research of the users’ experience of their environment. Follow- ing this line the researcher will try to identify the formal or physical features of environments that correspond with differential experience.

Two assumptions lie at the foundation of this kind of research. The first one is that the experience of an environment is constant or permanent and the second one is that the differences between experiences are mainly ascrib- able to the physical differences between environments. The first assumption means that a repetition of the observation of someone’s reactions to an en- vironment will give identical results; the second assumption implies that one can predict the experience of any environment, when one has isolated the formal differences between two environments that correspond with the differences in experience of these environments, irrespective of the person using this environment and apart from the circumstances under which the environment is used.

In the course of this contribution it will become clear that both assump- tions are hardly tenable,

153

DIMENSIONS OF QUALITY

There are two approaches that dominate the research on perception and experience of the environment: a direct one and an indirect one. Although not fundamentally, the difference between the two lies in the employment of representations of environments, artifacts such as pictures, drawings and others, that serve as material to which the respondent reacts. The direct approach makes no use of representations, the indirect one does.

The direct approach implies that the researcher asks his respondents to mention the favourable and unfavourable aspects of a particular environ- ment or,for instance, to draw a map of the spots in his neighbourhood that have a personal meaning to him. Commonly this approach is a success. After the interrogations the researcher draws up a list of characteristics that make an environment attractive or on the contrary repulsive to the respondent. He also can construct a collection of maps with salient spots of the respondents’ environment. These maps are called “cognitive maps”.

Lynch (1960) was one of the first researchers who intensively employed the technique of cognitive mapping. He interviewed residents of Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles about their cities and asked them to make draw- ings of their cities. Lynch discovered in these maps a certain regularity and structure. It enabled him to classify the elements of the maps into five groups: paths, nodes, landmarks, edges and districts. These groups can be considered as specified qualities of the urban environment.

In Holland De Jonge (1962) especially did some research on cognitive maps. He sampled data about the cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague. His results show that cognitive mapping is easier for the respondent when the street plan is regular, when there is a discriminable difference be- tween important and unimportant streets and when the city has some char- acteristic nodes. The research of Quakelbeen (1971) shows that landmarks play an important role in an old historic place like Gand in Belgium. Re- spondents tend to make use of landmarks when the street plan is less regular.

Cognitive maps can be conceived as perceptual schemas. A perceptual schema is a cognitive structure that prepares the observer to accept certain kinds of information of his environment and that directs the exploration of the observer (Neisser, 1976). Neisser asserts that perception is a cyclical pro- cess of renewing anticipations of probable changes in the environment, so that the observer is continuously ready to pick up the information when it becomes available. The result of the exploration alters the original schema and this modified schema will direct new exploration again. (See also the contribution of Mulder.)

It is reasonable to suppose that the explorative behaviour will be more intensive when the perceptual schema of the environment is incomplete or vague, such as in cities with an unclear structure or in a new environment. The schema will also be incomplete when the environment has a constantly changing content of information, such as at points of traffic intersection or

154

at other busy spots in the city. These parts of the schema demand continu- ous “correction” to a changed state of affairs. So a distinction can be drawn between parts of the schema of the environment that demand continuous “correction” and parts that do not. This attribute can be considered as a dimension of experience that probably corresponds with one of the results of the indirect approach, namely the activity or arousal dimension. The street with a strongly changing content of information is judged as “lively”, “exciting” and “busy” (Schellekens, 1976). Paths and nodes are the spots in a city where the resident has to be attentive. It is therefore conceivable that cognitive maps express the attentiveness that a particular element de- mands of the resident. Attentiveness is a condition to prepare him for the information to come.

Another group of studies that follow the direct approach consists of in- quiries about dwelling wishes and the questionnaires about favourable and unfavourable aspects of dwellingplaces. Commonly these studies result in a list of environmental qualities ordered according to their importance for the respondents. The most striking fact about these lists is the lack of sim- ilarity between them.

The two most important questionnaire studies in The Netherlands on en- vironmental qualities (Rijksplanologische Dienst, 1974 and Brouwer and Tacken, 1977), using representative samples of 3007 and 1046 adults, show little correspondence. They have nine qualities in common, natural elements, quietness, reputation of the neighbourhood, parking facilities, shops, play, people of own social class, town centre at reach and architectural variety of the neighbourhood, but these qualities occupy quite different places in the two lists. For instance, in the list of the Rijksplanologische Dienst the presence of natural green is quality number one, while in the list of Brouwer and Tacken it is number seven.

The lack of correspondence of the two lists makes it impossible to draw conclusions about how the environment should look. Comparison of the two lists with the one of Carp et al. (1976) results in still less definitiveness of a list of “true” environmental qualities. On the contrary, the suspicion is aroused that it is impossible to gather such a list and the fate of a re- searcher who diligently keeps searching for it will be that he will always get another result.

DIMENSIONS OF ENVIRONMENTAL EXPERIENCE

The main difference between the direct and the indirect approach is the employment of representations of the environment. Another important distinction is the technique with which experience is measured.

The indirect approach makes use of verbal measurement techniques con- sisting of a collection of scaled adjectival nouns, with which the respondent can express his opinion about a presented environment. Generally the re- spondent quantifies his own response by marking a specified number on

155

the rating scale. An exception to the rule is the technique of pair-wise com- parison of environments (see, for instance, GWing, 1976).

A fundamental assumption of the indirect approach is that the experience of an environment cannot be measured totally by one rating scale alone, but only by a considerable number of scales. Each rating scale measures only one aspect of experience. Factor analysis is therefore a characteristic technique of the indirect approach. The outcome of an indirect study usu- ally takes the form of a list of dimensions of environmental experience.

The kind and the number of extracted dimensions differ from study to study. Sometimes three dimensions are extracted (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974 - evaluation, arousal and dominance; and Schellekens, 1976 - evalu- ation, activity and accessibility), but other studies show many more dimen- sions (Pennartz, 1970; Franke and Bortz, 1972; Kiiller, 1973, for instance). All studies share at least two dimensions, namely Evaluation and Activity, sometimes called “Arousal”. The Evaluation dimension emerges as the more important one, explaining the largest proportion of variance in the judge- ment scores.

A way to discover the visual environmental qualities that are experienced positively or negatively is to vary some features of the environments and to observe the changes in reactions of the respondents. All kinds of environ- ments are suitable - landscapes, roads, streets, places, town centres, villages and facades. For each type of environment the experimenter presents a series of photographs and asks the respondent to judge them. The applied model is that the variance in judgement scores is explainable from the dif- ferences in the environments presented. Therefore the experimenter does not ask the respondent directly which environmental qualities please him, but he analyses afterwards which physical characteristics have played a major role in the judgement.

I will mention two examples of this type of research. One is a German study of Bortz (1972) on the experience of facades, the other one is a Dutch study of Schellekens (1976) on the experience of streets.

Bortz showed photographs of facades of 26 Berlin houses to 50 students of the University of Erlangen-Nurnberg. The impression the facades made on the respondents appear to be strongly associated with the visual features of the facades. The experience mainly depends on the emptiness of the facades. Large empty, bold surfaces arouse negative reactions. The pleasant- ness can be raised by artful arrangments of balconies and windows or by the decoration of the surroundings with trees and other natural green.

The fact of the unpleasantness of emptiness also appears in the study on streets. Eighty-seven students of the Eindhoven University of Technology participated in the study. They judged 15 colour photographs of Dutch streets, mainly of Amsterdam and Delft, varying in age, quietness, planting, width, height and monotony.

Two different techniques have been employed for the physical description of the streets. The first technique was the registration of salient visual char-

156

acteristics of the streets and the second one was the analysis of the picture of the streets into the proportions of certain street components. The charac- teristics that have relatively the greatest influence on pleasantness of streets are architectural variety and the presence of trees in the street. Both features explain the preference for canal streets and shady streets.

If the picture of streets is analysed according to the second technique and is pulled to pieces in terms of proportions of street components, such as “empty ground space”, “sky”, “wall”, “roof” and “natural green” then the street component of the empty ground space appears to be the most influ- ential component. The more empty the ground space the less pleasant the street. The component “natural green” is also an important one. An empty, bold street without natural green is the summit of unpleasantness, irrespect- ive of the number of cars or the number of pedestrians in the street. Not only the facade study of Bortz, but also the street study has shown that the covering of surfaces and spaces by permanent and solid objects is an important environmental quality.

THE CHANGEABILITY OF EXPERIENCE

Generally the research on the experience of the environment is not re- peated. If one were to repeat the observations, it would become clear that the reactions to the environment have changed. Experience is not constant.

This stat.ement is important enough not to be overlooked, for it would mean that an environmental policy based on the results of unique observa- tions relies on quicksand. Firstly, I will review the evidence of the change- ability of experience and secondly I shall try to present an explanation for it.

The first evidence comes from the above-mentioned street study (Schelle- kens, 1976). The results of this study show that a street that combines ar- chitectural variety and trees is the most pleasant one. Mostly this is a canal street. The preference for the canal street, however, changes when the psychophysiological state of the respondent has been altered. A respondent who has attained a state of heightened arousal does not prefer the canal street any longer, but a street filled with trees, a quietening and de-arousing street, while a respondent who has attained a state of lowered arousal will prefer a busy and varied street, such as a shopping street, which has an arous- ing effect on him. Apparently the preference and the experience of streets depends both on the changing psychophysiological state of the respondent and on the adequate physical qualities of the environment.

Another example of the changeability of experience is given by a study of Ertel (1973). His was a study on the experience of two-dimensional ab- stract figures. Ertel showed his subjects series of pairs of these figures, that varied in complexity. One member of the pair was always more complex than the other member. Ertel registered at which picture the subjects looked and he gathered semantic differential judgement scores of the pictures.

157

It appeared that, although he gave more attention to the complex pic- ture, the subject favoured the simple one when he had only 0.5 s looking time. However, when the looking time was prolonged to 4.0 s the complex picture became the more pleasant one. These data show that pleasantness is a function of the possibility of discovering meaning (order and structure) in the picture. A more complex picture offers more opportunity to discover meaning than a simple one.

Actually the conclusion is not very surprising, for the function of percep- tion is to inform us about our environment and about the meaning of ob- jects and events that surround us.

For a long time the study of the perception of meaning was too difficult for scientific psychology. Most researchers assumed that stimuli themselves cannot have meaning. It must be supplied by the perceiver after registration of the stimulus. Meaning is added only later on in the perceptual process by contribution from memory.

Recently the problem of perception of meaning has received more serious attention. Gibson (1977) tackles the problem through the concept of “af- fordance”. Affordances are all the potential uses of objects, the activities they afford. Invariancies of the optic array specify that the heap of stones lying in front of me affords building a house or paving the ground or using it as a barricade in a riot. These meanings or possibilities of use can be per- ceived by everybody, although mistakes are not ruled out.

The difficulty with affordances is the dependency on the person who per- ceives the environment. Every environment has a vast number of potential uses. The question then is which meaning a particular perceiver will discover in the environment. The simple answer to this question seems to be that he will perceive the meaning that suits him the best. Neisser (1976) asserts that the pick-up of information is directed by the perceptual schema of the perceiver. So, when this assertion is true, the meaning that will be perceived is the one that matches the actual schema the best. The schema will actually define what possibility of use will be searched for. An automobile driver will search for other qualities of the environment than will a playing child, because they have different perceptual schemas of the same environment. But there is something more to say about it.

The experiment of Ertel can teach us that the stimulus will be unpleasant when the search for meaning is not successful. Clearly, the discovery of meaning is a positive experience. The experience of an environment will then be positive when there are affordances to be discovered in the environ- ment that fit the perceptual schema of the perceiver.

Since the schema is changeable, so is the experience of the environment. This rule could explain why there is so little correspondence between

the lists of environmental qualities. It depends on the circumstances under which the researcher meets his respondents and it depends on the respon- dents themselves. The rule could also explain why the subjects changed their preference for streets in the street study of Schellekens. After the change of psychophysiological state, corresponding with a change of per-

158

ceptual schema, the subjects looked for other affordances of the environ- ment than before.

THE FUNCTIONS OF THE ENVIRONMENT FOR ITS USERS

The implication of the formulated rule is that it is impossible to identify once and for all the qualities that an environment should have. However, this implication does not have to interfere with the quest for the conditions of an environment to be a meaningful one for the user. There are some indi- cations of these conditions of meaningfulness, but they are still speculative, considering the state of knowledge of the field of environmental psychology. Therefore the indications have to be thoroughly tested before they are ac- ceptable.

Supposing that there is some truth hiding in the statement that a man will experience his environment positively when he has had a successful encounter with it, one can assert that the most elementary condition of the environment must be the encouragement or invitation to use the environment for one’s own purposes. Not inviting use means staying unemployed, and there is not much to be experienced in a non-used, empty environment. The next question is, of course, when the environment is encouraging or inviting use. What are the features of an encouraging and inviting environment?

There are many environments that are discouraging to the user by the domination of a certain kind of use, one that excludes all other kinds of use, for instance the automobile traffic and transport use of roads in the city. The encouragement of using the environment for one’s own purposes could be reached by the discouragement of domination of single uses.

Another feature could be that the environment is adequate, or can easily be made adequate, for the use one should like to make of it. Still other features possibly are freedom of choice, undisturbed use, and clarity to the user of the legitimacy of use. An environment possessing these features meets the first condition of an inviting and encouraging environment.

The second condition could be the opportunity to discover uses (or func- tions) of the environment, that fit the perceptual schema of the user. In order to meet this condition the environment must have the following fea- tures at least:

(1) the outroom space has been filled up by reachable solid objects, so that the opportunity is given to utilize the environment for one’s own pur- poses. The results of the facade study of Bortz (1972) and of the street study of Schellekens (1976), that show the unpleasantness of emptiness, support this hypothesis.

(2) the discovery of possibilities of use of the environment is stimulated when the objects in the environment have a form that is not dictated by a single function of that object, but that is neutral or tolerant to multiple functions. Objects with a strictly defined meaning offer the user too little freedom to make new discoveries. An object or an environment that has a form tolerating several functions possesses a quality that Berlyne (1971)

159

has called “collativity”. Collativity could be described as the coexistence of multiple meanings in one stimulus, so that the content of information of that stimulus is magnified. It is known that we are inclined to attend to objects and events with the greatest content of information (see Kahneman, 1973). We may assume that the object has to attract the attention of the user before he is able to discover possibilities of use.

Summarizing, the attempt to define and to determine the necessary quali- ties of the environment in terms of provisions and other concrete elements in the environment is assumed to be fruitless. One should identify as many qualities as there are users and kinds of circumstances of use. A better ap- proach seems to be to identify the conditions of use of an environment. The hypothesis is that there are at least two of those conditions, namely the encouragement or invitation to use the environment and the opportunity to discover new or ideosyncratic uses of the environment. Research to test this hypothesis is encouraging and inviting indeed.

REFERENCES

Berlyne, D.E., 1971. Aesthetics and Psychobiology. New York, N.Y. Bortz, J., 1972. BeitrB;ge zur Anwendung der Psychologie auf dem Stldtebau. Z. Exp.

Angew. Psychol., pp. 226-281. Brouwer, K. and Tacken, M., 1977. Wonen in Nieuwe Stadsuitbreidingen. Instituut voor

Stedebouwkundig Onderzoek, Technische Hogeschool Delft. Carp, F.M., Zawadski, R.T. and Shokrkon, H., 1976. Dimensions of environmental

quality. Environ. Behav., 8: 239-264. De Jonge, D., 1962. Images of urban areas: their structure and psychological foundation.

J. Am. Inst. Plann., 28: 266-276. Ertel, S., 1973. Exploratory choice and verbal judgment. In: D.E. Berlyne and K.B.

Madsen (Editors), Pleasure, Reward, Preference. New York, N.Y. Franke, J. and Bortz, J., 1972. Beitrtige zur Anwendung der Psychologie auf den StLidte-

bau. Z. Exp. Angew. Psychol., pp. 77-108. Glrling, T., 1976. The structural analysis of environmental perception and cognition.

Environ. Behav., 8: 385-415. Gibson, J.J., 1977. The theory of affordances. In: R. Shaw and J. Bransford (Editors),

Perceiving, Acting and Knowing. New York, N.Y. Kahneman, D., 1973. Attention and Effort. New Jersey. Kiiller, R., 1973. Beyond semantic measurement. In: R. Kiiller (Editor), Architectural

Psychology. Stroudsburg. Lynch, K., 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge. Mehrabian, A. and Russell, J.A., 1974. An Approach to Environmental Psychology. MIT-

Press. Neisser, U., 1976. Cognition and Reality. Principles and Implications of Cognitive Psy-

chology. Freeman, San Francisco, Calif. Pennartz, P.J.J., 1970. Een Beoordelingstechniek ten behoeve van Stedebouwkundig

Onderzoek. Sociologische Gids, 17: 107-114. Quakelbeen, L.G., 1971. De Herkenbaarheid van een Stadscentrum. Stedebouw en

Volkshuisvesting, 52: 19-23. Rijksplanologische Dienst, 1974. Onderzoek naar Woonmilieus. Ministerie van Volkshuis-

vesting en Ruimtelijke Ordening, Den Haag. Schellekens, H.M.C., 1976. De Straat. Een Omgevingspsychologisch Onderzoek. Disser-

tatie, Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven. UNESCO, 1973. MAB-Expert Panel on Project 13: Perception of Environmental Quality.

Final Report. Paris.