This is a blog about relations between people and their environment, mainly based on research in environmental psychology. It addresses matters of design, interior design, architecture and urbanism from a psychological point of view.
I belive that knowledge that environmental psychologists provide can be valuable to just about anyone. However, it’s quite obvious to me that environmental psychology just isn’t as well-known as it could be. One of the reasons for this might be that be is that there isn’t much popular science sources where people could get to know it – the most prominent sources to learn about it and keep up-to-date are scientific journals. While I love and respect science, I also belive that the scientific form of publishing might be too detailed (and too saturated with methodology and statistics) for wider audience.
That is why I’d like to address environmental psychology’s intended end users – architects, designers, and foremost, their customers, ordinary people who wish to build, change or improve their homes, or simply learn something new about relations between us and our environment. This blog is meant to be written in more conversational and informal tone, with a focus on main research results relevant to broader spectrum of readers. For those interested in more detail, links to original sources are provided (when possible).
The main concept of this blog is to (literally and metaphorically) illustrate ideas in environmental psychology; hence the subtitle – environmental psychology visualized.
The ultimate goal of environmental psychology as I see it should be to help improve boxes we live in to fit our hearts and minds. Hence the title – Mind Shaped Box.