Furniture Design Ideas

Sound, as a landscape element, has not received much interest in landscape design and planning compared to vision. Listening to an environment is generally not the primary activity or interest of a person (Jennings & Cain, 2012); however information provided by the visual landscape play a great role in realizing our daily activities. The concept […]

Cognition involves perception, thinking, problem solving and organization of information and ideas (Downs & Stea, 1973). Hence, environmental cognition can be defined as perception, understanding, organization and retrieval of spatial information. Through cognition, we construct images of our environment which help us to find our way in our daily lives. These constructed environmental images form […]

Assessment of landscape preferences is widely studied in environmental perception research. Landscape preference studies aim to investigate how and why people prefer some environments to others. People judge and interpret their environments and they respond to environments in terms of affective responses. Environmental preference is not luxury for people but essential and tied to basic […]

Basically, there are two approaches in visual landscape assessment; objective and subjective. Objective approach to visual landscape assessment assumes that visual quality of the landscape is an inherent characteristic and physical attributes of the environment determine its aesthetic value. On the contrary, subjective approach assumes that visual quality is in the eye of beholder and […]

Gestalt theory was developed by German psychologists Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Kohler in the early 20th century. The German word die Gestalt means "form" or "shape" and Gestalt theory of perception can be summarized as that people tend to perceive things as wholes rather than separate parts. It proposes "laws of organization in […]

Psychologist James J. Gibson has developed his "Theory of Affordances" based on an ecological approach towards visual perception. In his work "The Theory of Affordances" (originally published in 1979, 1986) he describes the environment as the surfaces that separate substances from medium in which the animal lives. He continues that the environment offers and provides […]

Rachel and Stephen Kaplan of University of Michigan are leading researchers in the field of environmental psychology. They have many published works on human-environment relationship. Kaplans’ information processing theory (1979) is amongst the most influential and well-known theories on landscape preferences. Information is the fundamental concept of their approach. Information has been central to human […]

Exploratory behavior, physiological arousal and experimental aesthetics were amongst the main interest areas of psychologist David E. Berlyne (1924-1976). He developed a psychobiological approach towards aesthetics. According to Berlyne, environmental perception is a process of exploratory behavior and information transmission which are triggered by the amount of conflict or uncertainty in the environment (Chang, 2009). […]

British geographer Appleton’s prospect-refuge theory stems from his habitat theory which proposes that human beings experience pleasure and satisfaction with landscapes that responds to their biological needs (Porteous, 1996). Appleton’s habitat theory basically depends on Darwin’s habitat theory, but with an aesthetical dimension. For Appleton, aesthetic satisfaction is "a spontaneous reaction to landscape as a […]

1.1.1 The biophilia hypothesis The biophilia hypothesis was developed by Edward O. Wilson, biologist in Harvard University, in 1984. The biophilia hypothesis proclaims that human beings have an inherent need for affiliation with natural environments and other forms of life. Wilson suggests that preferences for natural environments have a biological foundation as a result of […]