People and Environment

This course treats space as something people actively perceive, appraise, and inhabit rather than a neutral container designers fill in, drawing on environmental psychology and more critical readings (Escobar, Plumwood, Low) to ask how territoriality, crowding, privacy, and cultural meaning shape behavior — and how design quietly shapes them back. The work is mostly a semester-long term project built from real fieldwork: observing a setting, applying environmental-psychology research methods, and arguing through design implications, bracketed by two exams. It sits between your studio sequence and theory courses, giving you the behavioral evidence base that justifies the spatial moves you'll defend in fourth-year studio and thesis work.