About This Blog
“This place is inviting.”
“This place is so impersonal.”
“This place is confusing.”
We’re all aware that the places we inhabit affect us — they affect our mood, our behavior, our interactions with others.
But how does the design of a place affect us? What makes a place a good place? And how can designers create places that support the goals and needs of their users?
This place is for exploring these questions while promoting people-centered place design.
this place is for…
The general public:
To get people thinking and sharing about their experiences and interactions with places — positive, negative, and in-between.
Environmental designers, architects, urban designers and city planners:
To promote user-centered thinking in environmental design. There are many ways to evaluate a place (e.g. environmental impact, historical appropriateness, aesthetics), but the focus of this blog is to evaluate places and ideas from a user-centered, experiential perspective.
To provide a forum for ideas on how to design places that create positive experiences for people.
defining place…
A place, unlike a “city” which has prescriptive boundaries, is a more subjective term: a place is defined by your experiences and perceptions. A place could mean a street or a neighborhood, but it could also mean some other, more nebulous region that’s defined by some shared characteristic.
The focus of this blog is particularly on larger places that are shared or public (cities, neighborhoods, and streets vs. interior spaces).
This blog is published by Seth and Alexa Andrzejewski and Shin-pei Tsay. Seth just completed his Masters in City & Regional Planning, with a transportation focus, at U.C. Berkeley. Alexa is a User Experience Consultant helping to improve people’s experiences with interactive products at a consulting firm called Adaptive Path. Seth and Alexa share a passion for bringing urban design expertise and user experience awareness together. Shin-pei works for Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects in New York City by day and records her observations as an urban geographer at Bird to the North by night. She was the former COO for Project for Public Spaces and studied Cities, Space, and Society at LSE.