Cognitive Risk

Les Deux Magots, a Parisian café 

Upon each successive reading, I am always surprised by how well Bill Kleinsasser’s essays on the importance of experiential considerations in architecture have stood the test of time. They remain constructive and useful to designers because how people actually experience their physical environment is too frequently neglected in contemporary design in favor of aesthetic flash or fashion. The fact is the invariable human capacity and need for rich and expanded experiences demand that architects appreciate how to provide supportive conditions and important opportunities for people. He may be gone now, but Bill’s thoughtful lessons endure. 

The following excerpt from the 1981 edition of Synthesis addresses Bill’s notion of “cognitive risk” and the means by which designers can mitigate its effect through architectural means. Decades on, the words are more cogent than ever: 

Cognitive Risk
People often avoid desirable experiences because they anticipate some kind of personal risk in those experiences. 

Before one can relate to and comfortably choose to have a new experience, one must be able to preview the experience by imagining its impact and meaning; one must be able to assess its opportunities, the possibilities of “success” or “failure,” if there is something to be gained or lost, whether another experience is better, etc. 

A simple response to this frame of reference is described in Peterson’s paper, The Id and the Image / Design Implications of Human Needs: 

“We should make convenient indoor and outdoor gathering places where one can watch things happening without having to participate oneself. The French sidewalk café is an example: Loitering is encouraged by the sale of food and drink and the availability of games. People come and linger. They have a chance to look out over a street scene which is rich with activity, both human and non-human, and which would be, without the opportunity to pause and observe it, formidable and less accessible.” 

Another example which demonstrates response to this hypothesis is the workplace for 15 students built at the University of Oregon in the spring of 1969. The plan configuration provided several opportunities for those passing by the place to observe what was happening inside, together with several opportunities (varying in degree of required commitment) to come in and participate. The purpose of this plan-arrangement was to invite passersby to observe, come in, and learn about what we were doing. It worked too well: everyone came in and we were almost driven out. But compare this situation to that occurring in corridors where there are many doors with no windows, no stopping or tarrying places where information of some kind might be gained, and where one usually feels that entering any of the doors is very “risky.” 

In a more complex sense, this Frame of Reference is based upon the tendency for people to be overwhelmed or confused by places, people, and situations that are complex, that “come on too strongly,” or that reveal themselves all at once. In making the physical environment, this suggests the need for clear articulation of parts and places (parts and places that are differentiated or otherwise made more realizable). It also seems to imply the need for the gradual, rather than sudden, unfolding of the organization of places and the nature of their parts. 

Summary: 
Cognitive risk (anticipated personal risk) apparently may be reduced by providing the following in the built environment: 

1. Overview of what is to come (allowing detached participation)
2. Preview (beyond overview)
3. Slow reveal (not all at once or too much at once)
4. Precise separation (maybe controllable separation)
5. Other hints of what is coming (visual traces)
6. Clear evidence of boundaries, limits, hazards, conditions (clarifying territories, subspaces, and layers so that contact is not avoided because of apprehensive withdrawal or avoidance)
7. Opportunity to commit oneself in stages (to choose the degree of commitment)
8. Cross-views, back-views, reinforcing views (to allow a buildup of spatial or place understanding)
9. Clearly differentiated subparts and subspaces (to achieve #6 above)

WK/1981