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A Psychologically Meaningful Description of Environments Requires a Relational Approach

We firmly agree with Coolen that a significant contribution the ecological approach (Gibson, 1979) can make to environment-behavior studies concerns the central but vexing question of meaning. It is central because the meaning of environments for individuals underlies so much of what we do in our daily lives. The places we choose to enter, the places we occupy for sustained or brief periods of time, and the ways we design and arrange places rest to a large extent on their meaning in relation to our actions and goals. The question of meaning is vexing from the standpoint of environment-behavior analyses because of the way meaning has typically been treated in the psychological and social sciences. Specifically, the theoretical traditions that form the backbone of most environment-behavior research assume that meaning is a subjective, mental quality that individuals’ impose on an otherwise meaningless environment of physical structures. However, to adapt a point raised by Wohlwill (1973) over 30 years ago, this theoretical stance places individuals who are investigating, assessing, or designing human environments in an untenable position. For if meaning is a quality that is present only in a subjective mental realm of separate individuals, how can it and similar psychological phenomena possibly be tied in any systematic ways to the environment? If psychological experience is all ‘‘in the head’’, why assume that environmental design efforts will matter at all psychologically? This way of thinking has impeded progress in developing a psychologically meaningful treatment of the environment. We have each held for some time that the ecological approach offers an avenue for overcoming this dilemma (e.g. Heft 1981, 1997, 2001, Kyttä 2002, 2003, 2004). The concept of affordances is central in this regard. This concept refers to the functional possibilities that a feature of the environment offers to a particular individual. That is, a feature’s affordances are its meanings considered from a functional standpoint for some individual. For example, a horizontal surface of support positioned approximately at knee-height affords ‘‘sitting-on’’ for an individual (Mark 1987). Considered in this relational manner, the feature is not merely a physical feature, but also a functionally meaningful one; it is a place to sit. And its functional significance Housing, Theory and Society, Vol. 23, No. 4, 210–213, 2006