Watts, Mitra H.

2019-02-15T14:26:16Z

2019-02-15T14:26:16Z

1985

The objective of this research was to provide architects and interior designers with some design guidelines on colour selection derived from a series of investigations of the perceived psychological needs, attitudes and behaviour towards colour of the people who would be working in the office.

In reviewing the literature it was found that a confusion exists in defining the field of environmental psychology and more generally the absence of a theory for this field. As was evident from the review of the literature of various phases of research in environmental psychology, the absence of a general theory has been detrimental to efficient research, and this in turn has made it difficult to extract generalizations from the work of different investigators.

As a consequence, the first major objective in the present research became to develop a rationale for the selection of a conceptual framework by gathering supportive evidence from the available literature and by conducting several case studies.

Three categories of emotional responses related to "Pleasantness ", "Control" and "Excitement" have been found to be representative of a wide variaty of responses to the physical environment. These emotional responses were then used to measure the effect of a number of physical stimuli in the environment, (Chapter 7 and 8).

At the commencemeñt of this research, in an attempt to construct a semantic scale for the evaluation of interior spaces and hence searching for further support of the three emotional dimensions mentioned above the investigator ran several parallel studies related to residential and working environments. In brief, numerous visits were made to middle- income and low- income homes. The residents were shown a picture of a living room* and were asked to express their feelings about this space through descriptive adjectives. These adjectives then formed a second questionnaire which was used to measure the impression of the same living room, on a scale of 1 to 7, by a number of subjects (44 male and 37 female, age 22 -47) who had not yet participated in the study.

All the subjects used in these studies were residents of low and middle income families of Edinburgh - Scotland, and were visited in their homes. The resulting responses were factor analyzed using a principal component factor analysis, (see App. VII -A Table 9.1 and 9.2).

In additions, the descriptive adjectives elicited from Case Study III -B, Chapter Four, formed a questionnaire and were used by the office workers (28 male and 33 female, age 23 -50) of various clerical offices to rate their emotional responses to their working environment on -a scale of i to 7. These responses were also factor analyzed and are presented as App. VII -A, Table 9.1 and 9.3.

The analysis of the above studies provided further suport for the notion of the three dimensions of emotional response mentioned above.

http://hdl.handle.net/1842/34377

The University of Edinburgh

Annexe Thesis Digitisation Project 2019 Block 22

Colour and the office environment: the effect of colour on the subjective impression of the office environment and the people within it

Thesis or Dissertation

Doctoral

PhD Doctor of Philosophy