John Hutchings

Quantification of scene expectations and impact

Abstract A space or building must be both energy and people friendly. Hence, there are two major elements to our perceptions of any space we happen to view or inhabit – the ambient physical conditions and the psychologically perceived state of the space. This paper examines methodologies for quantifying the latter. Perceptions of an environment are hierarchical and we downgrade the space first on that feature of the space to which our attention is most sensitive. Hence, we need to make high energy consumption space attributes as low as possible in the hierarchy. Perhaps to some diners the visually perceived cleanness of a room may be of paramount importance. For such people it is suggested that perception of a low cleanness space will make these diners more aware of deficiencies in, for example, room temperature. Hence to minimise perception of, in this case, low temperature we need to maximise the psychophysical perception of cleanness. For such maximisation we must be able to measure and understand the effects of materials and design on our psychological perception of the space. There are two aspects to this – the physical properties of the space (for example chairs and decoration) and the impact and expectations (for example cleanness) generated by these physical properties. Bipolar scales can be used to quantify the physics of the scene and also our psychophysical response to the scene. In this way designers can be directed towards those elements of a designed space contributing to specific desired aspects of the space, such as cleanness. However, relationships discovered in this way do not necessarily help to quantify the initial impact of a design. A number of aspects of the scene may contribute to the perception of impact. Although for very many years colours have been described as hard or soft or warm or cool, artists have not used this vocabulary in a quantitative way. Kobayashi (1998) showed that colours can be quantifiably expressed in a designer helpful way using a diagram whose axes are warm to cool and hard to soft. This designer friendly description can be extended from colours to materials, to lighting as well as to the design itself (Hutchings and Luo, 2008). Optimisation of perceived comfort can help reduce awareness of energy consuming factors in the environment.