2008-11-05 P & R Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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7 At a more complex level, behaviour may be setting specific or effectively conditioned. This was Barker's focus (1968) when he defined what he called "behaviour settings". It was also was the focus of Gump (1971), LeCompe (1972), and Wicker (1972) who tried to "identify the sets of behaviour that occur in specific settings." 5 Their work collectively addresses why we act differently at a library as compared to a baseball stadium for example. Behaviour may also be the result of a subculture. Case in point: skateboard parks. "Why do so many skate board parks fail? Because well thought-out research into what skateboarding means to the youths, what it involves and what it represents to them and their peers is rarely done. Skateboarding has always been about the use/misuse of public property. That's where it gets its radical sense of appeal to the kids. That's what gives them the "rush" when they skate down a ramp at city hall for instance. Rather than use such information to guide our environmental approaches to the problem, we simply design areas with no connection to the nature of the behaviour itself. The result? 10 to 12 year olds using the parks while the 15 to 24 year old cohort continues to scour the city for better places to skate."6 Behavioural based profiling can also provide insight into inducing a desired behaviour. This brings us back to an earlier point, how to capture witness potential. Behavioural Based Designers realize that people are motivated by self-interest and in this regard will most often be oblivious to things that don't directly involve themselves or fail to catch their attention and, as a consequence, draw on their natural curiosity. Behavioural based designers should therefore be interested in any research that documents what is likely to be seen and remembered. Early research by Carr and Schissler found similiarities between what was watched (eye fixations) and what was remembered as people traveled along a highway outside of Boston using a head-mounted devices to track where a person looked, what the points of visual fixation were and how the person turned his or her head. This research was reinforced by Appleyard in 1969 in a study entitled "Why Buildings Are Known". Appleyard came up with several major characteristics that included buildings of unusual size, distinctive contours, complexity, distinctive landscaping or signage, visibility from major intersections, and single use buildings such as police stations.7 This type of research is needed to assist the behavioural based designer in unlocking the environmental characteristics needed so that we might successfully induce desired behaviour. As the science of behavioural based design grows and evolves, the Behavioural Based Designer's task can be expected to ease as more research is done on behaviour and more is known about the environments that support it. This has already been done to a sufficient degree on the marketing side of the food industry and to a lesser extent on the the security side of the convenience store industry. Applications from the field Over the years, I have frequently encountered problems that were not adequately addressed or anticipated by CPTED yet would benefit from CPTED solutions. Many of these problems are recurring in nature and therefore are predictable. Casual socialization is a common example of a behaviour that can become problematic when the physical environment is used in unconventional and undesired ways such as when congregation and socialization points develop in a rogue manner.