 Environmental psychology began in the late 60s because really there hadn't been any response from the field of psychology before to the need that architects had and other environmental groups like geographers and environmental managers of all kinds to the questions of human behavior in the environment. And so environmental psychology from the beginning was asked to address the question of how people perceived and behaved in relationship to the physical environment. We're commonly asked by architects as well as by the popular press, how does the physical environment impact or directly influence human behavior? And of course there are some ways that it does, but it's a more complicated story than that and a richer story and more interesting story than that because we in turn impact the environment. We have to try to get away from the simple-minded idea that space is somehow separate from people. We tend to talk about the physical environment as though it was a container and then we are in this container and so then we ask simple questions like how does the container influence us as though it's separate from us. A more useful way to think about it for architects is how do the settings they create afford a range of opportunities for people? We use this term affordance quite a lot because it's not deterministic. It recognizes that people have a range of responses to the influences on them. But those range of responses can be narrowed dramatically by bad design. One of the things that architects and landscape architects and anybody involved in design really needs to be doing is trying to enable people to achieve in their lives what they need to achieve. For example, to think of childcare and schools. If you look at very young children, the physical environment that they spend time in a childcare centre say or in a preschool enables them in different degrees to do what they want to try to do and young children are trying to play. Well if young children are in a monotonous room that is homogeneous with a single surface and has no storage, then the range of play that they can engage in is limited. If those same children are in another room that has carpeting, storage, little cubbies and is differentiated into smaller spaces, the range of things they can do increases enormously. So much so that research that's been done in this kind of setting shows that when you differentiate the space just a little bit, children engage in the same activities for longer periods, they are more deeply engaged, there's more social interaction between them, so actually simply that by breaking the space up you get richer play opportunity and better qualities of social interaction. Well architects seem to be most comfortable and clear when they're talking about buildings that people are not supposed to touch, you know they're supposed to be just looked at, that's when they're really at their happiest and clearest and I've attended many of those kinds of lectures. When you think about what the business is of making a home that people have done for generations and generations before architects came along, they did it with a whole wealth of knowledge that was not narrowly about structure. It was all about the qualities that they were trying to create for a rich full life, so it's ridiculous to think that one profession could just come in and do that by itself without a team approach. I suppose the reason architecture in the United States was much more open to the participation of the client in the design process and to recognizing the importance of a range of disciplines in the training of architects was all part of the opening up of the 1960s and 70s who the Zeitgeist of the time was about really being more participatory and being more inclusive. The death of that in the late 70s, I've never fully understood why architecture abandoned so completely that rich period and returned to something which was narrowly about the technical side of architecture plus a part of the human engagement which is appealing to architects which is the aesthetic part and the symbolic. After the mid 70s or late 70s, architects now start just talking about the meaning of architecture to people as though they can somehow impose meaning on people and how places are perceived in terms of their visual properties. Just like they're talking about a piece of art or a museum, the idea that people would be moving and struggling to use these buildings is uninteresting to them and one only has to look at all the architecture magazines to see there's no discussion of any of that. They're all empty of human behavior. The photographs are taken usually before people have had the chance to move in and mess up these beautiful objects that they create. It's not a social profession. It really is a profession of artists who are removed from their social responsibility. Of course, there are exceptions. Architects who try to work in a participatory way and there's one or two architecture schools that try to encourage that. I work a lot in the third world or the majority world, whatever you want to call it. And there, of course, the arrogance of architecture is harder to uphold because of the dire situation. So many people build their own homes and participatory design is more common because it's a necessity and I get to see the benefits of that. I get to see people meaningfully engaged in creating their own spaces that are close to their needs. But of course, they're not doing it with the same resources that we have here. So wouldn't it be wonderful if we could find a way to do participatory housing design, for example, in this country where people are allowed to at least finish off the buildings? Our graduate students and some of us on the faculty do get asked to do architectural programming and sometimes design evaluation. So that does happen, especially in complex environments where architects are willing to admit that they have to get help. For example, we're involved a lot in children's hospital design where it's obvious that external expertise is needed. Here's a very real case study. Last year in New York, New York City government was defending itself in a lawsuit brought by nonprofit groups working on homelessness who wanted to open up single room occupancy housing, which is the kind of housing it was created for single men after the war when there was a big housing shortage. We have lots of this housing still left in New York City and families are not allowed to be in it. And these homeless organizations coming from a good perspective obviously trying to create a solution to the housing problems that we should allow families with children into these single room occupancy houses. And I supported the city government and went on the side of trying to prevent this from happening. Fortunately, we won the case, but let me tell you what was important data for that. The important data for it was number one in my mind. We know that if you have more than one person per room on average, the stress levels are damaging. We now have good reason to believe that they even damage the brain. So if you have a high stress level like that in the first few years of life, you will actually affect the brain. So if anybody wants to find out why it is that the poor remain poor and why educational levels are the poor are as they are, we know that lead affects the brain, so finally we've got rid of lead. But architects need to know, and the people who design less architects, more than people who hire architects to build environments, that you cannot afford to have density levels of more than one person per room because you will have stress effects that affect the brain and development. That's strong data.