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BEHAVIOURAL STUDIES, A KEY ISSUE TO RESEARCH IN ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN
1 Architecture and Environment Laboratory, School of Architecture and Urbanism (ALGERIA)
2 Université Paris Sorbonne, Paris IV (FRANCE)
About this paper:
Appears in: ICERI2013 Proceedings
Publication year: 2013
Pages: 4607-4613
ISBN: 978-84-616-3847-5
ISSN: 2340-1095
Conference name: 6th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation
Dates: 18-20 November, 2013
Location: Seville, Spain
Abstract:
At one time planners and environmental designers assumed that they knew what was best for the public. They assumed they knew what the public's needs and preferences were and what the real-world constraints were. It is now widely recognized that planners' and designers' conceptions of needs and preferences might be quite different from those of the public, and that designers and the public are two groups with different values.

Indeed, our conceptual systems being based on our interaction with our surroundings, their structure is strongly affected by roles, activities and lifestyle. This implies that great differences exist between those professionals whose education, training and activities are related to environmental issues and ordinary people.

This difference is also due to the complexity of modern society where designers and users no longer share the same images and schemata, whereas in traditional societies images were clear and shared by everybody.
Indeed, in the past, builders and clients were basically from the same world. Their attitudes and values which were largely codified by tradition, were most of the time similar. Furthermore the client was in most cases the user. In a modern industrial society, the relationship between the producers and users of the built environment has become more complex. It became more frequent for designers to work for international organizations. However, the requirements of these organizations, cannot automatically be equated with those of diverse individuals. With the widespread recognition of the pluralistic nature of society and with numerous demands for users involvement, finding ways of identifying users real needs and preferences, rather than to rely on designers' intuitions has become the concern of an increasing number of researchers.
One approach to this problem of identifying people's needs, and the one advocated in this paper is through studying human-environmental behaviour. The main idea behind the study of behaviour, is that needs underlie over actions and therefore, studying behaviour will uncover and give details about needs.

Furthermore, because behaviour usually occurs in response to environmental stimulus, analyzing behaviour will give some details about the way people perceive their environment, what they think about it, how they interact with it, how and in what ways it affects them, how they react to it, and the role of culture in determining environmental meaning, attitudes, and quality.
The paper starts with a brief discussion about the gap between designers' and users' values, and the necessity to study and understand environmental behaviour in order to uncover people's needs. This is followed by an overview of the main research strategies and measurement techniques that have been used in the study of environmental behaviour.
Based on this critical review of the strengths and weaknesses of each of the methods traditionally used in environmental behaviour studies, the importance of a 'multiple-methods' research strategy is then introduced.
Keywords:
Environmental behaviour studies, users needs, responsive environment.