The Life Scientific: David Canter

And you went on to start your PhD at Liverpool, where you focused on the effect of office size on worker performance, which is really your first foray into the world of environmental psychology.

What does that field involve?

Well, the origins of it are that buildings were systems without any feedback.

And what you've got to do is start getting some evaluation of them.

And the important component of that was people's reactions to them.

So that's why I was brought into a unit that was studying office buildings.

And my job was to evaluate the buildings and evaluate.

They were very concerned about the impact of these huge open offices.

And one I studied had a thousand people in one big open room without any divisions above seated high level.

Goodness me.

So, I mean, they were they wondered if that was going to have an impact on the workforce and so on.

So there was a lot of that was the sort of start of it.

And we called it architectural psychology.

And there are many aspects of the meanings of buildings and people's reactions to buildings.

But what we find very quickly is people bring an awful lot to their interactions with the environment.

And therefore, there's no simple impact, as everybody tries to claim.

It's really about attitudes towards the environment and how that influences people's behavior.

Yeah.

Well, at this point, David, your PhD supervisor moved to Strathclyde University in Glasgow.

So you went along too.

You completed your PhD based in the architecture department there, working with the building performance research unit.

You went on to become a lecturer in architectural psychology at Strathclyde.

And your work led there to your extremely influential book, The Psychology of Place, which was published in 1977.

Talk me through what it

set out.