The reading Environmental Problem Solving(Coon & Mitterer, 2008) was very informative and insightful for me. I understood that the architectural design of one’s living house or workplace can have a large impact on a person’s psychological condition. Thus, even when there is enough space, people may feel crowded and stressed due to long corridors where they frequently bump into each other.
It suggests that designers and engineers should cooperate with psychologists when designing and constructing a building, in order to positively impact the psychological well-being of its future residents. Moreover, when the building is already constructed, it is possible to make small changes in design to significantly benefit the people who work or live in it. The changes, however, should be made only after meticulous environmental assessment to be absolutely sure that the benefits of the changes will outweigh their costs and potential drawbacks.
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"Critical Reading Analysis".
The material I read is not limited to theoretical research: it can be successfully applied in my own life. Based on different studies in architectural psychology, the authors demonstrate that even a small redesign of the living or working place can help us to avoid a lot of stress related to the feeling of overcrowding. Due to this material, I have looked on my living room from a different perspective. I can see that the space is organized in a wrong way: though there is enough of it, there are a lot of useless things that create obstacles. I can try to redesign my room by freeing the central space which will visually make the room larger and will thus make me feel better. The authors have come to the conclusion that the less space one has to pass when getting from one part of the building to another, the more comfortable one feels in this building (Coon & Mitterer, 2008). The problems of long corridors and passages is typical for students dormitories. When I go to college, I will pay attention to the organization of dormitories and, if I am given choice, I will prefer a dorm with a design that minimizes the feeling of overcrowding. I will also remember this principle when I will have to rent or buy a living house.
The reading material helped me to increase my understanding on the dependence of my emotional condition on the design on the buildings where I live and study. Very often we do not realize that the places of our residence, study or work are an important factor in our physical and psychological health, as we spend a lot of time in them. We rather blame the people around us and our life circumstances for our stressed or depressed condition. At one point of my life, I was participating in an educational program where students had to live in a dorm with long corridors and low ceilings for two weeks. Though the program and the people were great, I was feeling depressed most of the time and was afraid of making friends with any of them, though I am generally a sociable person. Now I realize that the design of the dorm was one of the reasons for that: I felt that there was no private room for me, though there was generally enough space for everyone.
Due to the reading, I realized that the skills and competence of psychologists extends much beyond solving emotional and cognitive problems to also embrace universally important environmental issues, such as overcrowding, overuse of resources and pollution. To evaluate the effect that environment has on people, they conduct complex environmental assessment that may take up to several months or even years. Psychology penetrates all the fields of our life and we can use its insights and discoveries to improve our own well-being though changes in the things that surround us. While it is generally true that the measure of a person’s happiness is mostly determined with his or her own attitude to it, we may still avoid a lot of stress and negative emotions if we make even slight changes in the design and appearance of the places where we spend most of our time.
