Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places

Design Management Review, Spring 2004 by Kruzinski, Donald

Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places by Toby Israel London: Acodemy Editions, 2003,252 pages, $45.00.

The objective of Some Place Like Home is to introduce the reader to utilizing in-depth design psychology as a useful conceptual tool to help bring forward, for architectural planning purposes, the inner environmental images we have packed away in our memory bank. In theory, reflecting back on places we once knew and liked as a child or in later years is a way to help create an ideal new environment to live or work in as an individual or group.

This is an extraordinary book, intellectually written (but with small print which may be difficult for some), offering a comfortable read to interior designers and architects. Although the methodology expresses a new concept, these types of investigative questions have provided the advertising and design field with customer insight for a long time. For the professional architectural community, this book may prompt new or further thinking along these lines.

Through a series of in-depth interviews with three influential members of the international architectural community, Toby Israel explores her theory that architectural design can be influenced by the childhood sense of self and place. She suggests that self and place are intertwined throughout life, growing and changing and molded by the environment in which we live and work, by our social and cultural surroundings, and by the aesthetic awareness we gain from those places and times. Through nine exercises, provided in the "Design Psychology Toolbox," the reader can learn how to bring these theories into practical use. The exercises, designed to instill selfawareness, can also be an effective tool in a group setting.

Some Place Like Home also includes thought-provoking project examples that incorporate the concept of design psychology for residential, institutional, and corporate design.

Reading this book will make you a believer, if you are not one already, that psychology and design go hand-in-hand. Adding the use of psychological tools to the designer's toolbox can provide earlier buy-in and shared ownership with clients as the journey begins to formulate and design some place like home.