Module 3 ABs-Part I

Michael Bull and Les Back.  "Introduction:  Into Sound" to The Auditory Culture Reader. Edited by Michael Bull and Les Back.  London:  Berg, 2003.

In their introduction, Bull and Back point out that our experience of space and environment aurally has been affected, or overrun, by the visual.  Sight is thought to be the strongest and most dominant of the senses, so can we somehow democratize the senses so that each have equal power?  They are clear that they do not want to replace one dominant sense with another, but instead show what can happen when we "think with our ears."

• Bull and Black claim that "a visually based epistemology is both insufficient and often erroneous in its description, analysis and thus understanding of the social world."
• Deep Listening involves practices of dialogue and procedures for investigation, transposition, and interpretation.  We are made to re-think social experience, our relationship to community, our relationship to our power, and how we relate to others and our inhabitable spaces.
• Surveillance is not just visual, but aural as well.
• Our experience with noise is rooted in our culture and socioeconomic standing. For example, the more private space you have, or are used to, the more you complain about noise.
• Technology has granted us the means to create quiet and isolation from noise.  
• Sonic Bridge:  the way in which music links he insides and outsides of social experience into a seamless web.
• Sounds are what we want them to be based on our mood or place, or on who we are.

Can one really control the sounds around them?  Certainly they have deep meaning and memory as is expressed here, but what is one to do when sound is not available, such as with the hearing impaired?

Janet R. Carpman and Myron A. Grant.  "Wayfinding:  A Broad View,"  in Handbook of Environmental Psychology, edited by Robert B. Bechtel and Arzah Ts'erts'man, 427-440.  New York:  John Wiley and Sons, 2002.

Carpman and Grant begin this chapter by making a strong statement that wayfinding is an "issue in which environment and behavior are indisputably intertwined."  Wayfinding is defined as "how living organisms make their way from an origin to a destination and back."  Successful wayfinding systems look at behavior, operations and design in order to reduce or eliminate the disorientation one may suffer the consequences of if indeed this system is faulty.

• Disorientation is the opposite, so to speak, of wayfinding and the result of inefficient, insufficient, or non-existent wayfinding systems.  Poor wayfinding, or disorientation, results in stress, frustration, physical ailments (such as high blood pressure and exhaustion) and can potentially be dangerous and deadly in some instances.  It can also affect ones confidence in themselves as well as the confidence others feel in them (as being late because of poor signage can convey a poor impression of a person.)
• Wayfinding is important to all clientele in a public space including Users, Staff, and Administration, affecting efficiency and time management, morale, confidence, and even the bottom line.
• Differing evidence of and approaches to wayfinding in literature by Popular Press (articles, news commentary, cartoons), Design Professionals (architects, designers) and Environmental Psychologists are presented.  What we learn through specific focus on Behavior, Design and Operation is that study of human behavior in conjunction with responsive design can begin to create more efficient systems of wayfinding.

It is interesting that the main focus of the examples in this article are on Healthcare Environments.  This is probably because they have posed the greatest examples of inefficiency of wayfinding in the built environment and provide a good example of the hierarchy of user groups.  I would love to see us focus on more "everyday" spaces, such as transportation hubs, parks, and shopping markets, as these are much more frequented by larger cuts of the population.  Should wayfinding be considered in more residential environments, or is this necessary?  Does a system exist already? 

Places like New York City, for example, pose the most difficult circumstances, or opportunities, for more cohesive and inclusive systems given the diversity of its population alone.

As I designer, the opportunity to have a hand in a holistic approach to the total design of a space, including the wayfinding portion, is key, as the designer understands the project and the client on a much more specific and total level, therefore, they may be most attune to the needs of the population involved.  The suggestions made by the authors to vary and focus on more real life studies by environmental psychologists is welcome and important, and the collaboration of designers with these professionals is an invaluable relationship.  The case studies provided prove this to be true.

I would also suggest that more work is done with evaluation post-occupancy, and this applies to the designers as well.  What is working?  What is not?  These are questions we should be asking so that we can improve upon the existing and make greater strides in the future.

Lang, Jon.  "Cognitive Maps and Spatial Behavior" In Creating Architectural Theory:  The Role of Behavioral Sciences in Architectural Design, 135-144.  New York:  Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1987.

In this chapter, Lang presents the term Cognitive Mapping and defines it as the process whereby people acquire, code, store, recall and decode information about the relative location and attributes of the physical environment through direct experience, what he/she has heard of a place, and by imagined information.  Essentially, we are creating images which we use to navigate, remember, and denote spaces that we are experiencing or have experienced previously.  The quality of this mapping and its opportunities can directly affect our behavior in the given space and can contribute to our sense of control, comfort, and ease.

• Though citing the work of many, Lang comes around to declare that the Gestalt Laws of visual organization hold true in most instances as excellent predictors of parts of an environment that are important to people.
• Kaplan's (4) types of knowledge are provided by Cognitive Mapping:  recognition, prediction, evaluation, and action.  These help us to choose the appropriate behavior in the environment.
• Lynch, in his study of cities, sees images conjured of cities as being either about identity, structure, or meaning.  Highly "imageable cities" are seen as well structured, so he looks at what elements make a city imagable.  The main categories of these elements include paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks.  These have been thought to be key to the images people have of place and how we characterize our journey through space.
• Lang presents that buildings are made memorable through their form, visibility and significant attributes, and further explains the components that support these characteristics.
• People's different approaches to mapping are explored and it is thought that "cognitive maps are a function of an individual's experience," and such experience is affected by such things as gender, physical/mental capacity, socioeconomic status, age and culture, though not all of this evidence is fully studied

This text is written in the late 1980's, prior to the information revolution brought about by the internet and technology.  We are now faced with a glut of information 24/7 and are hooked up and plugged into any means possible to distract us (or one could say save us) from really experiencing the world around us and by extension, distracted from creation of maps.  Technology also, in many ways, relieves us from the necessity of knowing where we are or where we are going or who we can navigate through space.  Smart phones, GPS, Google map, do it for us.  Is this acceptable, or is it supposed to be hard, like it is in a labyrinth?  I wonder how such things would affect the studies of Lynch today.  We have become so dependent on technology that in a way, we have lost track of the landmarks so key to the journey.

Also, I cannot help but think about the call for proper signage, and how this is mentioned in the chapter as a key component to mapping, and results in more comfort, less frustration, and yet, I still find proper signage to be at a premium.