Designing for Designers: Lessons Learned from Schools of Architecture

This book uses the approach of the seminal work The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch, by showing the importance of talking to people and gauging their shared mental images of places. That work transformed the way many design professionals and social scientists dealt with form. It complemented the "art" approach to design, in which users would be expected to move their chair to satisfy a designer's ego, with a social science approach that tried to gauge user reactions. This book brings attention to using the same approach for interiors and school buildings. The book discusses the findings for fifteen schools of design. The systematic user evaluations of the aesthetics, function, and technology reveal strengths to encourage in future designs, and weaknesses to avoid. Some of the findings on the design and process extend to all kinds of buildings on campus and elsewhere. Thus, although the book offers specific guidelines for future schools of design, it also offers guidelines with broader application to interiors for educational buildings and other building types, such as how to plan offices and gathering places to build community. This book should make readers more aware of problems in architectural interiors and of ways to make interiors work better for the building occupants.Features-- Brings a unique perspective to this important building type-- Applies a user-based and scientific approach to evaluate the interior design of fifteen schools of design-- Many of the findings for these interiors extend to all kinds of spaces on campus and elsewhere-- Offers guidelines for designs of the future

Jack L. Nasar (FAICP), Ph.D. 1979 Man-Environment Relations, Pennsylvania State University, is a Professor of City & Regional Planning, a member of the Graduate Faculty in Landscape Architecture at The Ohio State University, and the editor of the Journal of Planning Literature. He studies environmental meanings, cognition, fear, crime, and spatial behavior. His books include Environmental Aesthetics: Theory, Research, & Applications; The Evaluative Image of the City, Design by Competition: Making Design Competitions Work; and Universal Design and Visitability: From Accessibility to Zoning (forthcoming with J. Evans-Cowley). An invited lecturer around the world, he has received the EDRA Career Achievement Award, Ethel Chattel Fellowship from University of Sydney, and the Distinguished Alumni Award from the School of Architecture at Washington University, St. Louis.

Wolfgang F.E. Preiser is a Professor of Architecture at the University of Cincinnati, USA. He holds a Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University, Masters degrees in architecture from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and the Technical University of Karlsruhe, Germany, as well as the First State Exam from the Technical University in Vienna, Austria. As a researcher and international lecturer and building consultant, he has worked on topics ranging from universal design, to facility programming, building performance assessments, and health care facilities. His 16 books and 125 chapters, articles and papers in conference proceedings include Assessing Building Performance (2005), Improving Building Performance (2003) and, Universal Design Handbook (2001). He serves on the editorial boards of major journals and has received many honors, awards and fellowships, including the Progressive Architecture Applied Research Award and Citation.