Creatures of Habit

 "Teaching architectural design without teaching how everyday environment works is like teaching medical students the art of healing without telling them how the human body functions." 

-- Habraken

One of the things I love about architecture is its versatility as a cross-disciplinary field. I came from a liberal arts background and I loved learning in that type of environment because I got to see how all these different aspects of life can come together to influence architecture. One of my favorite courses was an environmental sociology course where we learned the sociological impacts on the built environment. People behave in strange ways just based on their everyday life and the unique situations they are placed in. For example, people will willingly remain in harmful areas because they are attached to their homes and their neighborhoods. They are also too afraid to ask for/accept government help (look it up...it's called the Great Paradox). Ultimately, they have a sense of cognitive dissonance when it comes to their habitat. 

Knowing this, our job as architects should be to create a space that respects this sense of place and home while offering solutions to complex problems. I don't think that architects have to become sociology experts, but learning about human behavior is essential in understanding how people might begin to occupy the spaces we create. Humans are creatures of habit, so there are patterns out there that we should be able to identify and respond to. How can we design for humans without understanding the basis for how they live? Just because we are design experts doesn't mean we should separate ourselves from everyday life and forget what it means to just exist in the built environment.