so CHAPTER 3

resulting in open-market buildings that embody commonly held values even
though users did not participate directly in the design. One example is the
Levittown development tract (Gans, 1967), which included such design ele-
ments as pitched roofs, picture windows, and large front lawns.

In another tradition, designers contract with individual clients who
request styled, one-of—a-kind buildings. Clients pay for the building, criticize it
during design, and eventually use it personally. To determine clients’ needs,
designers negotiate with them to reach an agreement on design. In such settings
clients may delegate considerable authority to the professionals they pay
because they want to benefit from the special expertise these professionals have:
expertise about such things as style, methods, and materials.

The most dramatic postindustrial development in environmental design
began when people concentrated around factories in cities and new technology
enabled construction of large buildings. Governments, factory owners, corpo-
rations, and other often well-intentioned groups of people contracted with
designers to construct settings and objects for masses of people to use daily:
parks, furniture, schools, hospitals, appliances, playgrounds, offices, dormito-
ries. In mass design like this, designers have two clients: those who pay for what
is built and those who use it (Madge, 1968). The user client has no choice and
no control. This situation presents designers with a problem: no matter how
much they negotiate with paying clients, it is difficult to plan for the needs of
user clients, who are neither well known nor readily available to plan with.

To solve or at least improve the user client problem, designers, adminis-

Paying clients
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/ / I \
// / // I \
/ //
Designers F: Gap

 

User clients

I,
. L1

 

The user-needs gap.

trators, researchers, users, and others have developed mechanisms that change
the boundary between designers and user clients. Citizen-participation tech-
niques that include user clients as members of design teams, giving them con—
trol that is traditionally reserved for paying clients, is one way to change the
boundary. Flexible building frameworks, with partitions and even alternative
facades (Habraken, 1972; Wampler, 1968), provide user clients with more
direct control over their surroundings by enabling them to adapt a structure
themselves. Each design case study in this book highlights inventive techniques
a team of designers and an E-B consultant has employed to change the bound-
aries among designer, researcher, paying client, and user clients. E-B research
changes the boundary by making more visible to designers the needs, desires,
and reactions of users to their surroundings, thus enabling designers to better