Sarah Rahmani - Architect (PHD)

Studies on human reaction to the environment fall in two main categories that include active and passive reactions. Due to being neutral and invisible, passive reactions have seldom been studied and their consequences are least known. In the field of environmental psychology, the phenomenon of user passiveness is called environmental numbness which is caused by habituation and unawareness towards environmental problems. However, people are sometimes aware of problematic environmental features but they seem numb towards them and do not act to better the conditions. Hence, there must be other causes to environmental numbness which is not known yet. Therefore, this research attempts to discover the different origins of environmental numbness and categorize them for researchers and designers so they can recognize the critical and potential settings for numbness and try to prevent it from happening. This research uses the qualitative research method in which with the aid of coding techniques, derives the sensitive concepts about causes and consequences of numbness from different studies and with logical reasoning, categorizes these concepts into meaningful and applicable groups. Finally, some ways of defeating environmental numbness are suggested which are subject to examination. This paper arrives at the conclusion that environmental numbness which is caused by 1) unawareness and 2) lack of control is best encountered with 1) raising user’s awareness; 2) increasing environment affective affordances in design; and 3) recognition of null effects in research. This paper also enumerates the types of built environment which are prone to environmental numbness.

Environmental Numbness, Awareness, User Passiveness, stimulus control,arousal