Phenomenology, Place, Environment, and

Architecture: A Review of the Literature*

David Seamon
Kansas State University
[email protected]
www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/
http://ksu.academia.edu/DavidSeamon

*A much-abbreviated version of this review appears as “A Way of Seeing People and Place: Phenomenology in
Environment-Behavior Research,” published in S. Wapner, J. Demick, T. Yamamoto, and H Minami (eds.), Theoretical
Perspectives in Environment-Behavior Research (pp. 157-78). New York: Plenum, 2000. For phenomenological
research since 2000, the reader should examine issues of Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 1990—
present, and available at: www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/EAP.html.

ABSTRACT
This review examines the phenomenological approach as it might be used to explore environmental
and architectural issues. After discussing the nature of phenomenology in broad terms, the review
presents two major assumptions of the phenomenological approach: (1) that people and
environment compose an indivisible whole; (2) that phenomenological method can be described in
terms of a “radical empiricism.”

The review then considers three specific phenomenological methods: (1) first-person
phenomenological research; (2) existential-phenomenological research; and (3) hermeneutical-
phenomenological research. Next, the article discusses trustworthiness and reliability as they can be
understood phenomenologically. Finally, the review considers the value of phenomenology for
environmental design.

Keywords: phenomenology, place, architecture, landscape, environmental experience, lifeworld,

home, dwelling, being-in-world, hermeneutics, environmental ethics

1. INTRODUCTION
In simplest terms, phenomenology is the interpretive study of human experience. The aim is to
examine and clarify human situations, events, meanings, and experiences “as they spontaneously
occur in the course of daily life” (von Eckartsberg, 1998, p. 3). The goal is “a rigorous description
of human life as it is lived and reflected upon in all of its first-person concreteness, urgency, and
ambiguity” (Pollio et al., 1997, p. 5).

This preliminary definition, however, is oversimplified and does not capture the full manner or
range of phenomenological inquiry. Herbert Spiegelberg, the eminent phenomenological philoso-
pher and historian of the phenomenological movement, declared that there are as many styles of
phenomenology as there are phenomenologists (Spiegelberg 1982, p. 2)—a situation that makes it
difficult to articulate a thorough and accurate picture of the tradition.

In this article, I can only claim to present my understanding of phenomenology and its significance
for environment-behavior research. As an environment-behavior researcher in a department of
architecture, my main teaching and research emphases relate to the nature of environmental
behavior and experience, especially in terms of the built environment. I am particularly interested in
why places are important for people and how architecture and environmental design can be a
vehicle for place making. I hope to demonstrate that the phenomenological approach offers an
innovative way for looking at the person-environment relationship and for identifying and
understanding its complex, multi-dimensioned structure.

In exploring the value of phenomenology for environment-behavior research, I have come to

believe strongly that phenomenology provides a useful conceptual language for bridging the
environmental designer’s more intuitive approach to understanding with the academic researcher’s
more intellectual approach. In this sense, phenomenology may be one useful way for the
environment-behavior researcher to reconcile the difficult tensions between feeling and thinking and
between firsthand lived experience and secondhand conceptual accounts of that experience. In this
article, I consider the following themes:

 the history and nature of phenomenology;

 key assumptions of a phenomenological approach;
 the methodology of empirical phenomenological research;
 trustworthiness and phenomenological research;
 phenomenology and environmental design.

Throughout my discussion, I refer to specific phenomenological studies, the majority of which

involve environment-behavior topics.1 Most of these studies are explicitly phenomenological,
though occasionally I incorporate studies that are implicitly phenomenological in that either the
authors choose not to involve the tradition directly (e.g., Brill, 1993; de Witt, 1992; Pocius,
1993; Tuan, 1993) or are unaware that their approach, methods, and results parallel a
phenomenological perspective (e.g., Krapfel, 1990, Walkey, 1993, Whone, 1990). I justify the
inclusion of these studies because they present aspects of human life and experience in new ways
by identifying generalizable qualities and patterns that arise from everyday human life and
experience—for example, qualities of the built environment that contribute to a sense of place,
order, and beauty (Alexander, 1987; 1993; Alexander et al., 1977; Brill, 1993; Rattner, 1993).

2. THE HISTORY AND NATURE OF PHENOMENOLOGY

The history of phenomenology is complex. Over time, as often happens with philosophical
traditions, there developed different phenomenological schools, styles, and emphases (Spiegelberg,
1982). As the founding father of phenomenology, philosopher Edmund Husserl believed that,
beneath the changing flux of human experience and awareness, there are certain invariant structures
of consciousness, which he claimed the phenomenological method could identify. Because Husserl
viewed consciousness and its essential structures as a pure “region” separate from the flux of
specific experiences and thoughts, his style of phenomenology came to be known as
“transcendental.”

Eventually, however, other phenomenological thinkers such as the German philosopher Martin
Heidegger and the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty reacted against Husserl’s
transcendental structures of consciousness (Heidegger, 1962; Merleau-Ponty, 1962). These
“existential” phenomenologists, as they came to be called, argued that such transcendental
structures are questionable because Husserl based their reality on speculative, cerebral reflection
rather than on actual human experience taking place within the world of everyday life (Schmidt,
1985).

In his 1927 Being and Time, Heidegger (1962) argued that consciousness was not separate from the
world and human existence. He called for an existential correction to Husserl that would interpret
essential structures as basic categories of human experience rather than as pure, cerebral
consciousness. In his 1945 Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962)
broadened Heidegger’s correction to include the active role of the body in human experience.
Merleau-Ponty sought to reinterpret the division between body and mind common to most
conventional Western philosophy and psychology. This “existential turn” of Heidegger and
Merleau-Ponty moved Husserl’s realm of pure intellectual consciousness “into the realm of the
contingencies of history and embodiment” (Polkinghorne, 1983, p. 205).

As a philosophical tradition, therefore, phenomenology has changed considerably since its founding
by Husserl, moving from cerebral structures to lived experience. In this article, I emphasize the
viewpoint of existential phenomenology, since the central focus of environment-behavior research
is the everyday environmental experiences and situations of real people in real places,
environments, landscapes, regions, spaces, buildings, and so forth.

I therefore define phenomenology as the exploration and description of phenomena, where

phenomena refers to things or experiences as human beings experience them. Any object, event,
situation or experience that a person can see, hear, touch, smell, taste, feel, intuit, know, understand,
or live through is a legitimate topic for phenomenological investigation. There can be a
phenomenology of light, of color, of architecture, of landscape, of place, of home, of travel, of
seeing, of learning, of blindness, of jealousy, of change, of relationship, of friendship, of power, of
economy, of sociability, and so forth. All of these things are phenomena because human beings can
experience, encounter, or live through them in some way.

The ultimate aim of phenomenological research, however, is not idiosyncratic descriptions of the
phenomenon, though such descriptions are often an important starting point for existential
phenomenology. Rather, the aim is to use these descriptions as a groundstone from which to
discover underlying commonalities that mark the essential core of the phenomenon.

In other words, the phenomenologist pays attention to specific instances of the phenomenon with
the hope that these instances, in time, will point toward more general qualities and characteristics
that accurately describe the essential nature of the phenomenon as it has presence and meaning in
the concrete lives and experiences of human beings.

3. SOME CORE ASSUMPTIONS OF A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH

In the last several years, there has appeared a growing number of works that discuss the relation of
phenomenology to the scholarly and professional worlds in general terms (Burch, 1989, 1990, 1991;
Embree, 1997; Stewart and Mukunis, 1990) and to specific disciplines—e.g, anthropology (Jackson,
1996); art (Berleant, 1991; Davis, 1989; Eisner, 1993; Jones, 1989); education (Fetterman, 1988;
van Manen, 1990); environmental design (Berleant, 1992; Condon, 1991; Corner, 1990; Dovey,
1993; Mugerauer, 1994; Howett, 1993; Vesely, 1988); geography (Cloke et al., 1991, chap. 3;
Relph, 1989b, 1990; Seamon, 1997); gerontology (Reinharz and Rowles, 1988); psychology (Pollio
et al., 1997; Valle, 1998); philosophy (Casey, 1993, 1996); social science (Rosenau, 1992); and
natural science (Bortoft, 1997; Heelan, 1983; Jones, 1989; Riegner, 1993; Seamon and Zajonc,
1998).

In much of this work, commentators have placed phenomenology within the wider conceptual and
methodological rubric of qualitative inquiry (Cloke et al., 1991; Fetterman, 1990; Lincoln and
Guba, 1985; Low, 1987). For example, Patton (1990, pp. 66-91) associates phenomenology with
such other qualitatively-oriented theories and orientations as ethnography, heuristic inquiry,
ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, and ecological psychology.

Patton argues that, in broadest terms, all these perspectives present variations on “grounded theory”
(e.g., Glaser and Strauss, 1967)—in other words, perspectives assuming “methods that take the
researcher into and close to the real world so that the results and findings are `grounded’ in the
empirical world” (Patton, 1990, p. 67). This perspective approaches theory inductively, in contrast
to “theory generated by logical deduction from a priori assumptions” (ibid., p. 66).

Patton’s identification of phenomenology with qualitative orientations is certainly acceptable,

though it is also important to realize that these various qualitative perspectives involve as many
differences as similarities, thus, for example, ethnographic inquiry typically studies a particular
person or group in a particular place in time; in contrast, a phenomenological study might begin
with a similar real-world situation but would then use that specific instance as a foundation for
identifying deeper, more generalizable patterns, structures, and meanings.

Similarly, both symbolic interactionism and phenomenology examine the kinds of symbols and
understandings that give meaning to a particular group or society’s way of living and experiencing.
The perspective of the symbolic interactionalist, however, most typically emphasizes the more
explicit, cognitively-derived layers of meaning whereas a phenomenological perspective defines
meaning in a broader way that includes bodily, visceral, intuitive, emotional, and transpersonal
dimensions.

Phenomenology, therefore, can be identified as one style of qualitative inquiry but involving a
particular conceptual and methodological foundation. Here, I highlight two broad assumptions that,
at least for me, mark the essential core of a phenomenological approach. These assumptions can be
described as follows:

1. Person and world as intimately part and parcel;

2. A radical empiricism.

I emphasize these two broad assumptions because the first relates to the particular subject matter of
phenomenology, while the second relates to the means by which that subject matter is to be
understood. I hope discussion of these two assumptions gives the reader a better sense of what
makes phenomenology distinctive and how this distinctiveness can offer a valuable tool for
environment-behavior research.
3.1. Person and World Intimately Part and Parcel
A central focus of phenomenology is the way people exist in relation to their world. In Being and
Time, Heidegger (1962) argued that, in conventional philosophy and psychology, the relationship
between person and world has been reduced to either an idealist or realist perspective.

In an idealist view, the world is a function of a person who acts on the world through consciousness
and, therefore, actively knows and shapes his or her world. In contrast, a realist view sees the person
as a function of the world in that the world acts on the person and he or she reacts. Heidegger
claimed that both perspectives are out of touch with the nature of human life because they assume a
separation and directional relationship between person and world that does not exist in the world of
actual lived experience.

Instead, Heidegger argued that people do not exist apart from the world but, rather, are intimately
caught up in and immersed. There is, in other words, an “undissolvable unity” between people and
world (Stewart and Mickunas, 1990, p. 9). This situation—always given, never escapable—is what
Heidegger called Dasein, or being-in-the-world. It is impossible to ask whether person makes world
or world makes person because both exist always together and can only be correctly interpreted in
terms of the holistic relationship, being-in-world (Pocock, 1989; Relph, 1989a; Seamon, 1990a).

In this sense, phenomenology supplants the idealist and realist divisions between person and world
with a conception in which the two are indivisible—a person-world whole that is one rather than
two. A major phenomenological challenge is to describe this person-world intimacy in a way that
legitimately escapes any subject-object dichotomy.

One broad theme that phenomenologists have developed to overcome this dichotomy is
intentionality—the argument that human experience and consciousness necessarily involve some
aspect of the world as their object, which, reciprocally, provides the context for the meaning of
experience and consciousness.

As Pollio (1997, p. 7) explains, intentionality “is meant to emphasize that human experience is
continuously directed toward a world that it never possesses in its entirety but toward which it is
always directed.” Intentionality, therefore, “is a basic structure of human existence that captures the
fact that human beings are fundamentally related to the contexts in which they live or, more
philosophically, that all being is to be understood as ‘being-in-the-world’” (ibid.).2

In examining peoples’ intentional relationships with their worlds, environment-behavior researchers

using phenomenology have typically drawn on three central notions that I review here—lifeworld,
place and home. These notions are significant for a phenomenological approach to environment-
behavior research because each refers to a phenomenon that, in its very constitution, holds people
and world always together and also says much about the physical, spatial, and environmental
aspects of human life and events.

3.1.1. Lifeworld
The lifeworld refers to the tacit context, tenor and pace of daily life to which normally people give
no reflective attention. The lifeworld includes both the routine and the unusual, the mundane and the
surprising.
Whether an experience is ordinary or extraordinary, however, the lifeworld in which the experience
happens is normally out of sight. Typically, human beings do not make their experiences in the
lifeworld an object of conscious awareness. Rather, these experiences just happen, and people do
not consider how they happen, whether they could happen differently, or of what larger experiential
structures they might be a part.

The natural attitude is the term by which the phenomenologist identifies the corresponding inner
situation whereby the person takes the everyday world for granted and assumes it to be only what it
is. In this mode of attention and awareness, people accept the lifeworld unquestioningly and rarely
consider that it might be otherwise. The natural attitude and lifeworld reflect, respectively, the inner
and outer dimensions of the essential phenomenological fact emphasized above: that people are
immersed in a world that normally unfolds automatically.

One major research focus relating to the lifeworld is its perceptual taken-for-grantedness (Abrams,
1996; Pocock 1993), thus, for example, Heelan (1983) argued that Western people tacitly perceive
the world in terms of a Euclidean-Cartesian perspective that organizes space in terms of rules of
mathematical perspectives. By examining the artistic presentations of space portrayed by post-
impressionist artists Cezanne and van Gogh, Heelan also considered ways by which we as
Westerners might become familiar with non-Euclidean modes of perceiving whereby concepts like
near/far, large/small, inside/outside are brought into question and shift in their experiential sense
(also see Jones, 1989).

Partly influenced by the seminal works on the acoustic dimensions of the lifeworld by Schafer
(1977) and Berendt (1985), there have also been phenomenological studies of the multimodal ways
in which the senses contribute to human awareness and understanding (Jarvilouma, 1994; Pocock,
1993; Porteous, 1990; Tuan, 1993; von Maltzuhn, 1994). One of the most unusual studies in this
regard is Schonhammer’s efforts to understand the experience of regular users of Walkman
headsets, both in terms of the impression that these users have on people nearby as well as the way
the sense of the surrounding world is changed for the users themselves (Schonhammer, 1988, 1989).

Other phenomenological researchers have considered how particular circumstances relating to the
environment or to the person lead to particular lifeworld experiences, thus Behnke (1990) and
Rehorick (1986) examined the experience of earthquakes phenomenologically, while Hill (1985)
explores the lifeworld of the blind person and Toombs (1992a, 1995a, 1995b) drew upon her own
experience of chronic progressive multiple sclerosis to provide a phenomenological explication of
the human experience of disability.

One insightful study relating to material aspects of the lifeworld is Palaasma’s architectural
examination of how the design aesthetic of Modernist-style buildings largely emphasized intellect
and vision and how a more comprehensive architecture would accommodate an environmental
experience of all the senses as well as the feelings (Pallasmaa, 1996). Another study linking
lifeworld with environment is Nogué i Font’s efforts at a phenomenology of landscape (Nogué i
Font, 1985, 1993). He attempted to describe the essential landscape character of Garroxta, a
Catalonian region in the Pyrenees foothills north of Barcelona. In developing a phenomenology of
this region, Nogué i Font conducted in-depth interviews with five groups of people familiar with
Garroxta in various ways—farmers, landscape painters, tourists, hikers, and recently-arrived
residents who were formerly urbanites.

In this study, Nogué is Font addressed a central phenomenological question: Can there be a
phenomenology of landscape in its own right, or does there exist only a phenomenology of that
landscape as particular individuals and groups experience and know it? He concluded that both
phenomenologies exist, and one does not exclude the other.

In describing the meanings of Garroxta for the farmers and painters, for example, Nogué i Font
(1993) found that, in some ways, the landscape has significantly contrasting meanings for the two
groups. In spite of these differences, however, both farmers and painters spoke of certain physical
elements and experienced qualities that mark the uniqueness of Garroxta as a “thing in itself.” For
example, both groups saw the region as a wild, tangled landscape of gorges, precipices, and forests
that invoke a sense of respect and endurance.

3.1.2. Place
One significant dimension of the lifeworld is the human experience of place, which, in spite of
criticism from non-phenomenologists (e.g., Rapoport, 1994), continues to be a major focus of
phenomenological work in environment-behavior research (Barnes, 1992; Boschetti, 1993; Bolton,
1992; Chaffin, 1989; de Witt, 1991; Hester, 1993; Hufford, 1988; Million, 1992; Oldenburg, 1989;
Pocius, 1991; Porteous, 1989; Relph, 1992, 1993; Seamon, 1992, 1993; Sherry, 1990, 1998; Smith,
1989; Tammeron, 1995; Weimer, 1991).

In philosophy, Casey (1994, 1996) has written two book-length accounts that argue for place as a
central ontological structure founding human experience: “place, by virtue of its unencompass-
ability by anything other than itself, is at once the limit and the condition of all that exists...[P]lace
serves as the condition of all existing things...To be is to be in place” (1994, pp. 15-16).

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty (1962), Casey emphasizes that place is a central ontological structure of
being-in-the world partly because of our existence as embodied beings. We are “bound by body to
be in place” (1994, p. 104), thus, for example, the very physical form of the human body
immediately regularizes our world in terms of here-there, near-far, up-down, above-below, and
right-left. Similarly, the pre-cognitive intelligence of the body expressed through action—what
Merleau-Ponty (1962) called “body subject”—embodies the person in a prereflective stratum of
taken-for-granted bodily gestures, movements, and routines (Ediger, 1994; Hill, 1985; Seamon,
1979; Toombs, 1992a, 1995a, 1995b).

The broad philosophical discussions of Relph (1976, 1990, 1993, 1994, 1996) continue to be a
significant conceptual guide for empirical phenomenologies of place (Boschetti, 1991, 1993, 1996;
Chaffin, 1989; Masucci, 1992; Million, 1993, 1996; Paterson, 1996; Seamon, 1993, 1996).

Perhaps the most comprehensive example is provided by Million (1993), who examined
phenomenologically the experience of five rural Canadian families forced to leave their ranches
because of the construction of a reservoir dam in southern Alberta. Drawing on Relph’s notions of
insideness and outsideness (Relph, 1976), Million sought to identify the central lived-qualities of
what she called involuntary displacement—the families’ experience of forced relocation and
resettlement. Using in-depth interviews with the families as her descriptive base, she demonstrated
how place is prior to involuntary displacement with the result that this experience can be understood
metaphorically as a forced journey marked by stages.

Becoming uneasy (1), struggling to stay (2), and having to accept (3) emerge in Million’s study as
the first three stages of involuntary displacement whereby the families realize that they must leave
their home place. The process then moves into securing a settlement (4) and searching for the new
(5)—two stages that mark a “living in between”—i.e., a middle phase of a forced journey and a time
when the families feel farthest away from place. Finally, with starting over (6), unsettling reminders
(7), and wanting to settle (8), the families move into a phase belonging to the rebuilding phase.

Million conducted her study at a time when the families were involved in the third year of
rebuilding, thus the end of a forced journey at that point remained to be seen. Her last chapter
therefore explored the hopeful possibility of rebuilding place. Million’s study is significant because
it examined the foundations of place experience for one group of people and delineates the lived
stages in the process of losing place and attempting to resettle.3

3.1.3. Home
Another important aspect of the lifeworld, home and at-homeness are another way in which the
situation of people immersed in world is often expressed existentially. Since the early work of
Bachelard (1963) and Bollnow (1961), the theme of home has received major attention from
phenomenologists (Barbey, 1989; Boschetti, 1990, 1993, 1995; Cooper Marcus, 1995; Day, 1995;
Dovey, 1985; Graumann, 1989; Koop, 1993; LeStrange, 1998; McHigh et. al., 1996; Norris, 1990;
Pallasmaa, 1995; Rouner, 1996; Seamon, 1993; Shaw, 1990; Sinclaire, 1994; Vittoria, 1992, Wu,
1991).

Shaw (1990), for example, conducted a firsthand description and phenomenological explication of a
return to a home place and family that he had not seen for some twenty years. In another
phenomenological study, Winning (1991) explored the relation between language and home by
drawing on experiences from teaching English as a second language to Canadian immigrants.

Using students’ written descriptions as an interpretive base, Winning developed five “axioms” in
regard to language and home—e.g., “at home people always speak to each other in a particular
way”; “an accent comes from somewhere else”; “when away from home we hear the sound of
words.” Winning then asked what educational value these axioms might have in teaching
immigrants as a second language: Given that there is a homelike quality to language, “what can be
attended to in the...classroom to foster a more homelike feeling in the second language?” (p. 180)

There is also a growing phenomenological literature on what home can mean in today’s postmodern
times of continual change, spatial fragmentation, and instantaneous communications (Casey, 1993;
Chawla, 1994, 1995; Mugerauer, 1994; Romanyshyn, 1989; Seamon, 1993; Silverstein, 1994). Day
(1995), for example, suggested that, in the last two centuries, the idea of home has become the core
of Western traditions and a mainstay of popular culture. In our ever-increasingly technological and
mobile society, however, home takes on new, ambiguous meanings, and Day argued that its
uniqueness experientially is in danger of being lost.
To identify the particular nature of at-homeness, Day asked a group of individuals to “describe a
time in which they felt at home” (p. 14). He identified five themes that appear to present “a general
structure of the experience of at-homeness” (ibid.): (1) home often invokes a timeless quality; (2)
home involves a positive attunement to the present moment; (3) home relates to a lived interplay
between safety and familiarity, on one hand, and strangeness and the uncanny, on the other; (4)
home offers an attunement to one’s self in relation to special others; and (5) home relates to healing
and personal well-being.

As with lifeworld and place, home as experience presupposes and sustains a taken-for-granted
involvement between person and world. This bond is largely unself-conscious, and the phenomeno-
logical aim it to make that tacitness explicit and thereby understand it.

3.2. A Radical Empiricism

If one key phenomenological assumption is the intimate connectedness between person and world, a
second assumption relates to what I call “radical empiricism”—the particular manner in which this
person-world connectedness is to be studied.

In using this descriptive phrase, I attempt to encapsulize the heart of phenomenological method by
indicating a way of study whereby the researcher seeks to be open to the phenomenon and to allow
it to show itself in its fullness and complexity through her own direct involvement and
understanding. In that this style of study arises through firsthand, grounded contact with the
phenomenon as it is experienced by the researcher, the approach can be called empirical, though the
term is used much differently than by positivist scientists who refer to data that are materially
identifiable and mathematically recordable.

If, in other words, phenomenological method can be called empirical, it must be identified as
radically so, since understanding arises directly from the researcher’s personal sensibility and
awareness rather than from the usual secondhand constructions of positivist science—e.g., a priori
theory and concepts, hypotheses, predetermined methodological procedures, statistical measures of
correlation, and the like. In this section, I first delineate in broad terms the particular attitude and
approach that phenomenology, as a radical empiricism, uses to examine the phenomenon as
thoroughly and as deeply as possible. Then, I present some specific phenomenological research
methods.

3.2.1. The Phenomenological Reduction, Intuiting, and Disclosure

Through a change in perspective—the phenomenological reduction as it is sometimes called—the
phenomenologist works to circumvent the taken-for-grantedness of the natural attitude and bring to
the lifeworld a directed, sympathetic attention (Spiegelberg, 1982, pp. 118-123).

The heart of the phenomenological reduction is what Spiegelberg (1982, pp. 682-687) called
phenomenological intuiting—an effort through which the phenomenologist works for an openness
in regard to the phenomenon under study. He or she attempts to meet the phenomenon in as free and
as unprejudiced way as possible so that it can present itself and be accurately described and
understood. The hopeful result is moments of deeper clarity in which the phenomenologist sees the
phenomenon in a fresh and fuller way.
Phenomenological intuiting requires discipline, patience, effort and care. It requires considerable
practice and training, and students can find their way to intuiting only by themselves, often in hit-
and-miss fashion. Intuiting is:

one of the most demanding operations, which requires utter concentration on the object
intuited without being absorbed in it to the point of no longer looking critically.
Nevertheless, there is little that the beginning phenomenologist can be given by way of
precise instructions beyond such metaphoric phrases as “opening his eyes,” “keeping them
open,” “not getting blinded,” looking and listening (Spiegelberg, 1982, p. 682).

Through intuiting, the phenomenologist hopes to experience a moment of insight in which she sees
the phenomenon in a clearer light. I call this moment of greater clarity the phenomenological
disclosure, though it might also be described by such phrases as “the aha! experience,” “revelatory
seeing,” or “pristine encounter.” Through phenomenological disclosure, the student hopes to see the
thing in its own terms and to feel confident that his or her seeing is reasonably correct.

In phenomenological intuiting, therefore, the researcher’s personal efforts, experiences, and insights
are the central means for examining the phenomenon under study and arriving at moments of
disclosure whereby the phenomenon reveals something about itself in a new or fuller way.

Generally, phenomenological intuiting involves a series of smaller and larger disclosures that slowly
coalesce into a fuller sighting of the phenomenon. In this sense, intuiting is rarely a single moment
of revelation in which understanding is had in one full swoop. Instead, intuiting is gradual and
unpredictable. Through the researcher’s wish, effort, and practice, the phenomenon is seen in
smaller and larger ways. Patterns, relationships, and subtleties gradually arise of which the student
was not aware before. In her depiction of phenomenological intuiting as a flow and spiral, Tesch
(1987, pp. 231-232) described the unpredictability and serendipity of the process well:

Obviously, the [phenomenological] researcher must begin somewhere and intends to end
somewhere. Thus there is a movement, a progression, and eventually, an arrival. It would be
wrong, however, to picture this movement as a straight, sequential process. It is even a bit
misleading to think of it as a process. To conjure up an image of what this movement is like,
it helps to see it more in terms of a flow, or of a cycling and spiraling motion that have no
clearly distinguishable steps or phases. Typically, the researcher would be hard pressed to
say where this flow begins. She knows only that her first data collection session already
contained the seeds of what is usually termed the “analysis.” The first ideas of how to make
sense of the data are born then, and other ideas may come to her at any time during any
research activity, even up to the eventual writing of her results (pp. 231-232).

3.2.2. Key Characteristics of Phenomenological Method

There is more to the phenomenological enterprise than phenomenological reduction and
phenomenological intuiting, but these two processes mark the core of phenomenological method.4
Having discussed this core, I can now make the following claims about phenomenological method
as a radical empiricism:
1. The study must involve the researcher’s direct contact with the phenomenon. If the
phenomenologist studies a person or group’s experience, then she must encounter that experience as
directly as possible. Methodological possibilities include the researcher’s participating in the
experience, her conducting in-depth interviews with the person or group having the experience, or
her carefully watching and describing the situation supporting or related to the experience.

If the phenomenon being studied is some artifactual text—for example, photographs, a novel, or
music—the researcher must find ways to immerse herself in the text so that she becomes as familiar
as possible with it. Thus, she might carefully study the text and thoroughly record her experience
and understanding. She might ask other parties to respond to the text and provide their insights and
awareness. Or she might study other commentator’s understandings of the text—for example,
reading reviews of the novel or studying all critical commentaries on the author or artist in question.

In short, the researcher must facilitate for herself an intimacy with the phenomenon through
prolonged, firsthand exposure.

2. The phenomenologist must assume that she does not know the phenomenon but wishes to.
Ideally, the phenomenologist approaches the phenomenon as a beginner—in fact, phenomenology
is often defined as a “science of beginnings” (Stewart and Mukunas, 1990, p. 5). Whereas in
positivist research, the student typically begins her inquiry knowing what she does not know, the
phenomenologist, does not know what she doesn’t know. The phenomenon is an uncharted territory
that the student attempts to explore.

The phenomenologist must therefore always adapt her methods to the nature and circumstances of
the phenomenon. A set of procedures that work for one phenomenological problem may be
unsuitable elsewhere. In this sense, the central instrument of deciphering the phenomenon is the
phenomenological researcher herself. She must be directed yet flexible in the face of the
phenomenon.

In short, the phenomenologist has no clear sense of what she will find or how discoveries will
proceed. The skill, perceptiveness, and dedication of the researcher is the engine for
phenomenological research and presupposes any specific methodological procedures.

3. Since the researcher as human instrument is the heart of phenomenological method, the specific
research methods she uses should readily portray human experience in experiential terms. The best
phenomenological methods, therefore, are those that allow human experience to arise in a rich,
unstructured, multidimensional way.

If the interview format seems the best way to gather an account of the phenomenon, then the
researcher must be open to respondents and adapt her questions, tone, and interest to both
respondents’ commentaries and to her own shifting understanding as she learns more about the
phenomenon. If the researcher uses a novel, photograph or some other artifactual text to examine
the phenomenon, then she must be willing to return to its parts again and again, especially if an
exploration of one new part offers insights on other parts already considered.

In short, phenomenological method incorporates a certain uncertainty and spontaneity that must be
accepted and transformed into possibility and pattern. The phenomenological approach to a
particular phenomenon must be developed creatively and allow for a fluidity of methods and
research process.

4. SPECIFIC PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHODS

Having considered, broadly, some central components of phenomenological method, I next wish to
review attempts to identify specific methodological forms of phenomenological research.

For the most part, it has been psychologists—especially psychologists associated with what has
come to be called the “Duquesne School of Phenomenological Psychology”—who have sought to
establish reliable procedural methods for conducting empirical phenomenological research (Giorgi
et al., 1983; Valle, 1998; also see Moustakas, 1994).5

Drawing on the designations of Duquesne phenomenological psychologist von Eckartsberg (1998a,

1998b), I discuss two methodological approaches—what von Eckartsberg calls the existential and
the hermeneutic. I also add a third approach that I call first-person. I describe this approach first,
since it draws on the realm of experience closest to the researcher—her own lived situation.

4.1. First-Person Phenomenological Research

In first-person phenomenological inquiry, the researcher uses her own firsthand experience of the
phenomenon as a basis for examining its specific characteristics and qualities (Chaffin, 1989; Lane,
1988; Seamon, 1992; Shaw, 1992; Toombs, 1992a, 1992b, 1995a, 1995b, Wu, 1991). One example
is the work of Violich (1985, 1998), who examined the contrasting qualities of place for several
Dalmatian towns with varying spatial layouts. Using such techniques as sketching, mapping, and
journal entries, he immersed himself in each place for several days and sought to “`read’ each as a
whole” (1985, p. 113).

One of the most sensitive and exhaustive uses of first-person phenomenological research is the work
of Toombs (1992a, 1992b, 1995a, 1995b), who lives with multiple sclerosis, an incurable illness
that affects her ability to see, to hear, to sit, and to stand. In her work, which most broadly can be
described as a phenomenology of illness (especially 1995a), she demonstrates how
phenomenological notions like the lived body provide “important insights into the profound
disruptions of space and time that are an integral element of changed physical capacities such as loss
of mobility” (Toombs, 1995b, p. 9).

Toombs’ method involved a continual dialectic between phenomenological notions as conceptually

understood versus their concreteness as known directly in her own lived experience. For instance, to
provide an understanding of how the disabled person’s loss of mobility leads to a changed
interaction with the surrounding world, Toombs recounted in detail a typical experience—her
journey by airplane to a professional conference. At one point in her narrative she described airport
check-in:

Once in the terminus I go to the airline check-in counter. In my battery-operated scooter I

am approximately three and a half feet tall and the counter is on a level with my head. All
my transactions with the person behind the counter take place at the level of my ear. The
person behind the counter must stretch over it to take my tickets, and I must crane y neck
 and shout to be heard (ibid., p. 14).

From such lived examples, Toombs drew phenomenological generalizations—for example, she
described how her loss of upright posture relates to Merleau-Ponty’s broader notions of bodily
intentionality and the transformation of corporeal style (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 76). Thus the loss
of uprightness is not confined to problems of locomotion but also involves deeper experienced
dimensions like the diminishment of one’s own autonomy and the tendency of able persons to treat
the disabled as dependent or even subnormal.6

Another way in which the first-person approach can be used is phenomenology is as a starting place
from which the phenomenologist can bring to awareness “her preconceived notions and biases
regarding the experience being investigated so that the researcher is less likely to impose these
biases when interpreting [the phenomenon]” (Shertock, 1998, p. 162; also see Colaizzi, 1973).

In this sense, if the phenomenologist has access in her own experience to the phenomenon she plans
to study, first-person research can offer clarity and insight grounded in one’s own lifeworld.7 This
understanding is derived from a world of one, however, and the researcher must find ways to
involve the worlds of others. This need leads to the method of existential-phenomenological
research.

4. 2. Existential-Phenomenological Research
The basis for generalization in existential-phenomenological research is the specific experiences of
specific individuals and groups involved in actual situations and places (von Eckartsberg, 199a, p.
4). In the discussion of lifeworld and place research above, Million’s phenomenology of involuntary
displacement (Million, 1998) and Nogué i Font’s phenomenology of landscape (Nogué i Font,
1993) are good examples in that the basis for generalization is the real-world experiences of the
ranchers forced to relocate or the farmers and landscape painters of Garroxta.

Phenomenological psychologists, particularly those associated with the Duquesne School, have
devoted considerable effort to establishing a clear set of procedures and techniques for this style of
phenomenology (see Valle, 1998). For van Eckartsberg (1998b, p. 21), the heart of this approach is
“the analysis of protocol data provided by research [respondents] in response to a question posed by
the researcher that pinpoints and guides their recall and reflection.”

Specifically, he speaks of four steps in the process: (1) identifying the phenomenon in which the
phenomenologist is interested; (2) gathering descriptive accounts from respondents regarding their
experience of the phenomenon; (3) carefully studying the respondents’ accounts with the aim of
identifying any underlying commonalities and patterns; and (4) presentation of findings, both to the
study respondents (in the form of a “debriefing” about the study in ordinary language) and to fellow
researchers (in the form of scholarly presentation).

Other phenomenologists have discussed the steps in existential-phenomenological work in ways

that more or less echo von Eckartsburg’s four stages (e.g., Giorgi, 1985; Churchill et al., 1998;
Wertz, 1984). Whatever the particular phrasing, the common assumption is that the individual
descriptive accounts, when carefully studied and considered collectively, “reveal their own thematic
meaning-organization if we, as researchers, remain open to their guidance and speaking, their
disclosure, when we attend to them” (von Eckartsberg, 1998b, p. 29). In short, we return to the
openness and spontaneity of the phenomenological disclosure discussed above.

The existential-phenomenological approach makes one important assumption in its claim for
generating generalization. The approach assumes a certain equivalence of meaning for the
respondents whose experience the researcher probes. In other words, the claim is that “people in a
shared cultural and linguistic community name and identify their experience in a consistence and
shared manner” (von Eckartsberg, 1998a, p. 15).

Procedurally, this claim means that respondents (1) must have had the experience under
investigation and (2) be able to express themselves clearly and coherently in spoken, written, or
graphic fashion, depending on the particular tools used for eliciting experiential accounts. Ideally,
the respondents will also feel a spontaneous interest in the research topic, since personal concern
can motivate the respondent to provide the most thorough and accurate lived descriptions (Shertock,
1998, p. 162).

These requirements mean that inquiry is not carried out, as in positivist science, on a random sample
of subjects representative of the population to which findings will be generalizable. Rather, some
respondents will be more appropriate than others because of their particular situation in relation to
the phenomenon studied or because they seem more perceptive, thus better able to articulate their
experience.

Usually, in phenomenological research, “subjects” are instead called “respondents” or “co-

researchers,” since any generalizable understanding is a function of the sensibilities of both
respondent and researcher. As Shertock (ibid.) explains: “The emergent meaning is co-constituted
by the description of the experiences [from the respondents] and the interpretive process of the one
seeking the prereflective structure of the experience.”

In practice, there is exact step-by-step procedure for conducting existential-phenomenological

research beyond the general stages identified above. As explained earlier, the individual style of the
researcher and the specific nature of the phenomenon are much more important for establishing the
specific research procedure and tools of description.

In her study of involuntary displacement, for example, Million (1993) spent much time locating
participants who wished to share their experience and who appeared to be able to offer that sharing
in a thoughtful, articulate way. She involved these participants in several in-depth interviews, the
formats of which shaped and reshaped themselves as she learned more about each family’s
experience and the broader events of the dam construction. In addition, she lived with some of the
ranch families and asked them to accompany her on “field trips” to the flooded areas that used to be
their ranches. In short, Million’s specific methods and procedures were auxiliary to the nature and
needs of her own individual research style, her research participants, and her phenomenon of
involuntary displacement.
4. 3. Hermeneutic-phenomenological research
Most broadly, hermeneutics is the theory and practice of interpretation (Mugerauer, 1994, p. 4),
particularly the interpretation of texts, which may be any material object or tangible expression
imbued in some way with human meaning—for example, a public document, a personal journal, a
poem, a song, a painting, a dance, a sculpture, a garden, and so forth.

The key point hermeneutically is that the creator of the text is not typically available to comment on
its making or significance, thus the hermeneutic researcher must find ways to discover meanings
through the text itself. As von Eckartsberg (1998b, p. 50) describes the hermeneutical process:

One embeds oneself in the process of getting involved in the text, one begins to discern
configurations of meaning, of parts and wholes and their interrelationships, one receives
certain messages and glimpses of an unfolding development that beckons to be articulated
and related to the total fabric of meaning. The hermeneutic approach seems to palpate its
object and to make room for that object to reveal itself to our gaze and ears, to speak its own
story into our understanding.

In environment-behavior research, much of the phenomenological work has been hermeneutic

because the aim is often an understanding of material environments, whether furnishings, buildings,
cultural landscapes, settlement patterns, and the like (Alexander, 1987, 1993; Alexander et al., 1977;
Anella, 1990; Brenneman, 1995; Chaffin, 1989; Chawla, 1994; Chidester and Linenthal, 1995;
Condon, 1991; Francis, 1995; Harries, 1988, 1993, 1997; Hieb, 1990; Holan, 1990; Lin, 1991a; Lin,
1991b; Lipton, 1990; Mugerauer, 1993, 1994, 1995; Norberg-Schulz, 1980, 1988, 1996; Paterson,
1991, 1993a, 1993b; Relph, 1976, 1990, 1992; Riegner, 1993; Seamon, 1991, 1993, 1994;
Silverstein, 1993b; Stefanovic, 1994; Sturm, 1990; Swentzell, 1990; Thiis-Evensen, 1987; Walkey,
1993; Wu, 1994).

One useful example of the value of a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach in environment-

behavior research is the work of Norwegian architect Thiis-Evensen (1987), who proposes a
universal language of architecture by focusing on the experienced qualities of floor, wall, and roof,
which he says are “the most basic elements in architecture” (ibid., p. 8).

Through a hermeneutic reading of many different buildings in different cultures and historical
periods, Thiis-Evensen suggests that these three architectural elements are not arbitrary but, rather,
common to all architectural styles and traditions. The essential existential ground of floor, wall, and
roof, he argues, is the relationship between inside and outside: Just by being what they are, the floor,
wall, and roof automatically create an inside in the midst of an outside, though in different ways: the
floor, through above and beneath; the wall, through within and around; and the roof, through under
and over.

Thiis-Evensen demonstrates that a building’s relative degree of insideness or outsideness in regard

to floor, wall, and roof can be clarified through motion, weight, and substance—what he calls the
three “existential expressions of architecture” (ibid., p. 21). Motion relates to the sense of dynamism
or inertia evoked by the architectural element—i.e., whether it seems to expand, contract, or rest in
balance. Weight involves the sense of heaviness or lightness of the element and its relation to
gravity. Substance refers to the material sense of the element—whether it is soft or hard, coarse or
fine, warm or cold, and so forth. The result, claims Thiis-Evensen, is an intricate set of tensions
between architectural elements and experience.

In his work, Thiis-Evensen assumes that architectural form and space both presuppose and
contribute to various shared existential qualities—insideness-outsideness, gravity-levity, coldness-
warmth, and so forth—that mark the foundation of architecture as human beings experience it
(Seamon, 1991).

For example, if one studies the lived qualities of stairs, one realizes that narrow stairs typically relate
to privacy and make the user move up them more quickly than up wide stairs, which better express
publicness and ceremonial significance. Similarly, steep stairs express struggle and strength,
isolation and survival—experienced qualities that sometimes lead to the use of steep stairs as a
sacred symbol, as in Mayan temples or Rome’s Scala Santa. On the other hand, shallow stairs
encourage a calm, comfortable pace and typically involve secular use, as, for example,
Michelangelo’s steps leading up to the Campidoglio of Rome’s Capitoline Hill (Thiis-Evensen,
1987, pp. 89-103).

I discuss Thiis-Evensen’s work at length here because it is an exceptional example of one

researcher’s effort to look at a text—buildings in many different times and places—and to identify a
series of experiential themes that do justice to “the integrity, complexity, and essential being of the
phenomenon” (von Eckartsberg, 1998b, p. 50).

One test of the value of Thiis-Evensen’s experiential theory is that other researchers have found his
interpretation to be a useful language for examining in detail the work of specific architects and
specific architectural styles (e.g., Kushwah, 1993; Lin, 1991b; Lin and Seamon, 1993; Ramaswami,
1991).

At the same time, it is important to emphasize that Thiis-Evensen does not claim that his way of
architectural interpretation is the only way, and clearly there could be other hermeneutics of
architecture that would provide other ways of presenting and understanding architectural meaning
(e.g., Harries, 1988, 1993, 1997; Mugerauer, 1993; Alexander, 1987, 1993). This is a key aspect of
all hermeneutical work: there are many ways to interpret the text, thus interpretation is never
complete but always underway.

4.4. Commingling Methods

Very often the phenomenological researcher uses the first-person, existential, and hermeneutic
approaches in combination, thus, for example, Nogué i Font (1993), in his phenomenology of the
Garroxta landscape, made use of interviews but also did hermeneutic readings of nineteenth-century
Garroxtan photographs and the pictures of artists associated with the nineteenth-century Garroxta
school of landscape painting.

One of the most sensitive examples of a phenomenological study drawing on multiple methods is
Chaffin’s study of one Louisiana river landscape as it evokes a sense of place and community
(Chaffin, 1989). Chaffin’s focus is Isle Brevelle, a 200-year-old river community on the Cane River
of Lousiana’s Natchitoches Parish.
His conceptual vehicle to explore this place is simple but effective: to move from outside to inside,
first, by presenting the region’s history and geography, then by interviewing residents, and, finally,
by canoeing the Cane River, which he comes to realize is the “focus of the community-at-home-
and-at-large” (ibid., p. 41). As he glides by the river banks, he become aware of a rhythm of water,
topography, vegetation, and human settlement. He writes:

Once on the water, the earlier feelings of alienation and intrusion were gone. I came directly in
contact with a spatial rhythm. As the valley’s horizon is formed by the surrounding sand hills, so the
river’s horizon is formed by the batture [the land that slopes up from a waterway to the top of a
natural or artificial levee], silhouetted against the sky when viewed from a canoe. I had the
paradoxical sensation of being both high and low at the same time; held down between the banks,
yet as high as the surrounding fields.

The meanders of the once-wild current organized this experience. As I paddled around the
bends, the rhythm unfolded. On the outside of the curve, I was contained by a steep bank,
emphasized by red cedar sentinels. Only rooftops and cars passing along the river road
hinted at a world beyond. On the inside, I was released into a riverside world of inlets,
peninsulas, and undulating banks softened by black willows, some even growing directly
from the water on submerged bars....

As the curves changed direction, the containment and release offered by the two sides of the
river altered in turn and, in `my own little world,’ of the river, everything seemed to fit
(ibid., p. 102).

In his study, Chaffin begins with a hermeneutic study of the natural and cultural landscape through
scientific and historical documents. He also observes the community of Isle Brevelle firsthand and
sees a strong sense of place, which he understands more fully through an existential stage of study
involving interviews. Finally, through the first-person experience of canoeing on the river, he sees
clearly that the river is not an edge that separates the two banks but, rather, a seam that gathers the
two sides together in belonging as one place.

The ultimate question, especially for the non-phenomenologist, is whether, in fact, phenomeno-
logical interpretations like Chaffin’s offers a truthful picture of the phenomena they purport to
present. This question leads to the issue of validity and trustworthiness as understood
phenomenologically.

5. RELIABILITY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Though phenomenological research in the human sciences has been criticized on a number of
grounds,8 perhaps the most significant concern among conventionally-trained, positivist social
scientists is the issue of trustworthiness—in other words, what criteria can be used to establish the
reliability of phenomenological descriptions and interpretations?

From a phenomenological perspective, the issue of reliability first of all involves interpretive
appropriateness: In other words, how can there be an accurate fit between experience and language,
between what we know as individuals in our own lives versus how that knowledge can be
accurately placed theoretically? As von Eckartsberg (1998a, p. 15) explains,
 How is it that we can say what we experience and yet always live more than we can say, so
that we could always say more than we in fact do? How can we evaluate the adequacy or
inadequacy of our expression in terms of its doing justice to the full lived quality of the
experience described?

How are thought and life interrelated so that they can be characterized as interdependent, as in need
of each other, as complementing each other, as interpenetrant? Living informs expression (language
and thinking) and, in turn, thinking-language-expression reciprocally informs and gives a
recognizable shaped awareness to living. Meaning, experience as meaningful, seems to be the fruit
of this dialogue between inchoate living and articulate expression. Whereas living is unique and
particular, i.e., existential, thinking tends toward generalization, toward the universal, the essential,
the phenomenological.

Beyond the issue of interpretation’s rendering experience faithfully is the dilemma that several
phenomenologists, dealing with the same descriptive evidence, may present their interpretations
differently and arrive at entirely different meanings. In an article comparing three phenomeno-
logically-based interpretations drawing on the same descriptive evidence, Churchill and colleagues
(Churchill et al., 1998) attempt to deal with this issue of interpretive relativity. They point out that,
in conventional positivist research, reliability refers to the fact that one can establish an equivalence
of measurement, where measurement refers to quantification according to an predetermined scale or
standard (ibid., p. 64). If, however, “measurement” must be applied to the qualitative descriptions of
phenomenological research, the required equivalence is much more difficult to establish: “[N]ot
only is the criterion for agreement between two verbal descriptions not clearly defined, but also an
agreement among judges regarding the equivalence of descriptions becomes equally difficult to
establish” (ibid., p. 64).

As a way to consider the issue of reliability phenomenologically, Churchill and colleagues

organized the following phenomenological experiment: They presented the same set of narrative
descriptions to three researchers all trained in phenomenological method.9 Each researcher was free
to bring his or her set of concerns and questions to the descriptions.

After studying the three resulting interpretations, Churchill and colleagues concluded that, though
there were some differences in emphases, there was also a common thematic core.10 In this sense,
the experiment indicated that phenomenological interpretation offers some degree of equivalence,
since a “somewhat coherent set of themes can be gleaned from three different interpretive research
results” (ibid., pl 81). On the other hand, there were also differences among the three interpretations,
but these differences do not so much indicate the failure of phenomenology as a method but, rather,
demonstrate the existential fact that human interpretation is always only partial.11

In this sense, reliability from a phenomenological perspective cannot be defined as some

equivalence of measurement based on some predefined scale of calculation separate from the
experience and understanding of the researcher. Rather, reliability can only be had through what can
be called intersubjective corroboration—in other words, can other interested parties find in their
own life and experience, either directly or vicariously, what the phenomenologist has found in her
own work? In this sense, the phenomenologist’s interpretations are no more and no less than
interpretive possibilities. As Giorgi (1975, p. 96, cited in Churchill et al., p. 81) explains:

Thus the chief point to be remembered with this kind of research is not so much whether
another position with respect to the [original descriptions] could be adopted (this point is
granted beforehand) but whether a reader, adopting the same viewpoints as articulated by
the researcher, can also sea what the researcher saw, whether or not he agrees with it. That is
the key criterion for [phenomenological] research.

In this sense, whether one is doing or reading phenomenological research, it is important to allow
ourselves the time and space to be with and follow the other’s presentation, whether of the person
being interviewed, the art work being interpreted, or the final phenomenological report. The aim is
an openness and empathy whereby we begin to sense the other’s situation and meaning.

In spite of the relativity of phenomenological trustworthiness, one can identify qualitative criteria
that can help to judge the validity of phenomenological interpretation—at least in broad terms (e.g.,
van Manen, 1990; Polkinghorne, 1983). Polkinghorne (1983, p. 46), for example, presented four
qualities to help readers judge the trustworthiness of phenomenological interpretation: vividness,
accuracy, richness, and elegance.

First, vividness is a quality that draws readers in, generating a sense of reality and honesty. Second,
accuracy refers to believability in that readers are able to recognize the phenomenon in their own
lifeworlds or they can imagine the situation vicariously. Third, richness relates to the aesthetic depth
and quality of the description, so that the reader can enter the interpretation emotionally as well as
intellectually. Finally, elegance points to descriptive economy and a disclosure of the phenomenon
in a graceful, even poignant, way.

Using these four criteria, one can evaluate the effectiveness of specific phenomenological work—
for example, the above-mentioned first-person studies of Toombs and Violich. Note that, from a
conventional positivist perspective, the reliability of this work would immediately be called into
question because of the issue of extreme subjectivity: How can the reader be sure that the two
researchers’ understandings of their own experiences speak in any accurate way to the realm of
human experience in general?

But also note that, in terms of Polkinghorne’s four criteria, the issue is no longer subjectivity but,
rather, the power to convince: Are Toombs’ and Violich’s first-person interpretations strong enough
to engage the reader and get her to accept the researchers’ conclusions? In this regard, Toombs’
first-person phenomenology of illness (Toombs, 1993a, 1993b) succeeds in terms of all
Polkinghorne’s criteria: Her writing is vivid, accurate, and rich in the sense that the reader is drawn
into the reality of her descriptions and can believe they relate to concrete experiences that she, the
reader, can readily enter secondhand.

In addition, Toombs’ work is elegant because there is a clear interrelationship between real-world
experiences and conceptual interpretation. In sum, the reader can imaginatively participate in
Toombs’ situations and conclusions. What she says “seems right” as her connections between
phenomenological theory and lived experience allow the reader to “see” her situation in a thorough,
heartfelt way.
On the other hand, Violich’s portrait of Dalmatian towns can be judged as less trustworthy in terms
of Polkinghorne’s four criteria because Violich’s interpretations seem too much the image of an
outsider experiencing place for only a short time. He describes these towns largely in terms of
physical features and human activities as they can be read publicly in outdoor social spaces. There is
no sense of what these places mean for the people who live and work there. The resulting
interpretation seems incomplete and lacking in the potential fullness of the places as they are
everyday lifeworlds.12

We could use Polkinghorne’s four criteria to evaluate other studies discussed above. For instance,
Million’s existential-phenomenological approach to the ranch families’ involuntary displacement
satisfies the criteria exceptionally well, portraying a lived experience that the reader can follow
concretely and vividly, yet at the same time, using that empirical evidence as a means to identify the
broader stages of losing one’s place and having to resettle elsewhere.

Similarly, Thiis-Evensen’s hermeneutic phenomenology of architectural form and space is powerful

because it holds a conceptual consistency and cohesion that provides valuable new insights into the
lived-aesthetics of specific buildings and architectural styles.

On the other hand, Nogué i Font’s phenomenology of the Garroxta landscape is less effective
because the specific understandings of his five groups as well as the essential nature of the Garroxta
landscape seems opaque and without the vividness and richness that groups intimately familiar with
place—e.g., the farmers and landscape painters would be expected to possess.13

Ultimately, the most significant test of trustworthiness for any phenomenological study is its relative
power to draw the reader into the researcher’s discoveries, allowing the reader to see his or her own
world or the worlds of others in a new, deeper way. The best phenomenological work breaks people
free from their usual recognitions and moves them along new paths of understanding.

6. PHENOMENOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN

In the end, the phenomenological enterprise is a highly personal, interpretive venture. In trying to
see the phenomenon, it is very easy to see too much or too little. Looking and trying to see are very
much an intuitive, spontaneous affair that involves feeling as much as thinking. In this sense,
phenomenology might be described as a method to cultivate a mode of seeing that cultivates both
intellectual and emotional sensibilities, with the result that understanding may be more whole and
comprehensive.

Because architecture and design also regularly involve a process of intuitive awareness and
discovery, a phenomenological approach may be one way to rekindle designers’ interest in
environment-behavior research—an interest that seriously waned as architects and other designers
became uncomfortable with the strong positivist stance of environment-behavior studies in the
1970s and 1980s.

According to Franck (1987, p. 65), a key reason for this discomfort was the unwillingness of social
scientists to “understand or accept the [more intuitive] strategies and priorities of the design
professions” (ibid). Franck emphasized that one of the greatest values of phenomenology is its
potential for providing a place for dialogue between designers and social scientists because it gives
attention “to the essence of human experience rather than to any abstraction of that experience and
because of its ability to reconcile, or perhaps to bypass completely, the positivist split between
`objective’ and `subjective’“ (ibid., pp. 65-66).

As Thiis-Evensen’s work indicates, many of the more recent phenomenological works relevant to
environment-behavior research use phenomenological insights to examine design issues
(Alexander, 1987, 1993, et. al, 1977; Barbey, 1989; Boschetti, 1990; Brill, 1993; Coates, 1998;
Coates and Seamon, 1993; Cooper Marcus, 1993; Dorward, 1990; Dovey, 1993; Francis, 1995;
Hester, 1993; Howett, 1993; Mugerauer, 1993, 1994, 1995; Munro, 1991; Murrain, 1993; Paterson,
1993a, 1993b; Porteous, 1989; Rattner, 1993; Seamon, 1990; Silverstein, 1993a; Silverstein, 1993b;
Thiis-Evensen, 1987; Violich, 1998; Walkey, 1993). Dovey (1993, p. 267) has summarized
phenomenology’s value for environmental design well:

The rigorous application of a phenomenological perspective to the built environment entails

a critical analysis of the design process to ensure that the primacy of experience is not lost to
the complexities or scale of the development; to failures of communication; to the
imperatives of capital development, or to the lure of geometry as an end in itself. In
particular, phenomenology entails a critical distinction between lived-space and geometric
space, between the experience of place and the geometric simulations which are a means to
its effective transformation.

7. MAKING BETTER WORLDS

In placing phenomenological work in today’s broader intellectual landscape, Mugerauer (1993, pp.
94-95) points to critics on both the “right” and “left.” On the “right,” are the positivists, who see
phenomenology as “subjective,” “soft,” and “anectodal.” On the “left,” are the post-structuralists
and deconstructivists, who question phenomenology’s belief in commonality, continuity, pattern,
and order.14

In phenomenology and hermeneutics, Mugerauer sees a middle way between the absolutism of
positivism, on one hand, and the relativism of post-structuralism, on the other. This is so, says
Mugerauer, because in its efforts to see and understand human experience and meaning in a kindly,
open way, phenomenology strives for a balance between person and world, researcher and
phenomenon, feeling and thinking, and experience and theory. This effort of balance, he believes
(ibid., p. 94) is crucial “if we are to adequately understand, plan, and build a socially pluralistic and
ecologically appropriate environment.”

In regard to environment-behavior research, a phenomenological approach emphasizes that the

material world plays a significant role in the quality of human life exactly because human beings are
always everywhere immersed in their worlds, which in part is physical. The central aim is to explore
and to interpret that mutual relationship through examining behavior, experience, and meaning in a
descriptive, interpretive manner as they happen in their everydayness.

The long-term impact of phenomenology on environment-behavior research remains to be seen.

The advances in the last ten years are encouraging, though among mainstream researchers the
approach is still obscure. I hope this article makes phenomenology more understandable and
indicates the considerable value it can have for making better places and environments.

8. NOTES

1. In this article, I largely highlight research of the last ten years. For discussions of earlier phenomenological work
relating to environment-behavior research, see Seamon, 1982; Seamon, 1987; Seamon, 1989.

2. Unintentionally, this phenomenological assumption that people and world are intimately part and parcel gives
environment-behavior research a central place in the human and environmental sciences, since the recognition is that the
crucial unit of study is the lived fabric of inescapable connectedness between people and world. Environment-behavior
research gives attention to one key aspect of this connectedness—viz., the ways that the physical, spatial, and human
portions of the world sustain, reflect, and potentially change the lives and experiences of particular individuals and
groups.

3. Closely related to the theme of place is the topic of sacred space, which has also received increasing attention
phenomenologically in the last ten years (Barnes, 1992; Brenneman and Brenneman, 1995; Chdester and Linenthal,
1995; Cooper Marcus, 1993; Eliade, 1961; Lane, 1988; Lin, 1991; Lin and Seamon, 1993; Muguerauer, 1994, chap. 4;
Whone, 1990; Wu, 1993. Also related is work dealing with a phenomenology of environmental ethics (Abrams, 1996;
Cheney, 1989; Foltz, 1995; Mugerauer, 1994; Margadant-van Archen, 1990; Stefanovic, 1991; Weston, 1994).

4. For example, Spiegelberg (1982, pp. 681-717) follows phenomenological intuiting with phenomenological analyzing
and describing as well as broader phrases of investigation that include, among others, “investigating general essences”
and “watching modes of appearing.” Again, I emphasize that each phenomenological problem necessarily requires a
different starting point, method, and manner of presentation, thus, it becomes difficult to delineate a definite set of rules,
stages, procedures, or formats.

5. In contrast, phenomenological studies in environment-behavior research have typically given only minimal discussion
to methodological issues, partly because the perspective has relatively few adherents and partly because real-world
studies have arisen largely from the ideas of phenomenological philosophers like Heideggerand Merleau-Ponty, who
reach their conclusions largely on the basis of personal reflection rather than through some wider corroborative method
that would validate conclusions as also correct for other human beings.

6. Toombs (1995b, p. 17) writes: “Whenever I am accompanied by an upright person, in my presence strangers
invariably address themselves to my companion and refer to me in the third person. `Can SHE transfer from her
wheelchair to a seat?’ `Would SHE like to sit?’.... When I am unaccompanied, people often act as if my inability to walk
has affected not only my intelligence but also my hearing. When forced to address me directly they articulate their
words in an abnormally slow and usually loud fashion....” (p. 17).

7. Obviously, the phenomenologist cannot always have firsthand experience of the phenomenon. One example is Hill’s
work on the environmental experience of the blind (Hill, 1985). Hill was sighted herself and therefore lived with
congenitally-blind individuals and interviewed them in depth.

8. I have discussed a number of these criticisms elsewhere (Seamon, 1987, pp. 15-19).

9. The description related to the current sexual practices of a young woman who had previously been the victim of a date
rape.

10. This thematic core involved a common focus on “a vacillation within the [respondent’s] experience from active to
passive agency, with passivity emerging precisely at those moments when a decision is called for on the subject’s part.
Likewise, all three see her as `disowning’ her body—disconnecting her `self’ from her actions when her integrity is at
stake. Finally, all three see that her integrity within the situation is a function of her...desire for a sexual experience that is
`shared and reciprocal’“ (ibid., p. 81).
11. From a phenomenological perspective, Churchill’s experiment is artificial in the sense that two of the researchers
interpreting the lived description did not actually gather it from the respondent, thus they had no sense of the lived
context out of which the description arose. In addition, these two researchers were recruited after the description was
already solicited, thus they had no personal interest or stake in the phenomenon being studied. It is significant that, in
spite of these weaknesses, the three researchers are able to identify similar core themes.

12. On the other hand, Violich’s work is still important because it serves as one model for first-person phenomenologies
of place. More such studies are needed, coupled with other ways to read place as in Million’s and Chaffin’s work
(Million, 1993; Chaffin, 1989).

Other useful models include Hufford’s interpretation of the New Jersey Pinelands (Hufford, 1986), Lane’s work on
American sacred spaces and places (Lane, 1988), Mugerauer’s hermeneutic readings of the contemporary North
American landscape (Mugerauer, 1993, 1994), Pocius’ in-depth study of a Newfoundland harbor village (Pocius, 1991,
and Walkey’s presentation of the multi-story, guild-build houses of mountainous northern Greece, western Turkey, and
the adjoining Balkan states (Walkey, 1993).

13. At this point, the reader may well ask why he or she should trust my evaluation of these various studies’ strengths and
weaknesses. There is not space here to justify my judgments in depth. I would ask the interested reader to go to these
studies directly and evaluate them for himself or herself. Certainly, there might be disagreements. On the other hand, I
would expect that, with a sizable group of evaluations, we would begin to find a certain degree of consistency (though
never total agreement because, again, interpretation is always partial) as to the relative strengths and weaknesses of the
various studies. In a sense, we would be participating in a phenomenology of phenomenological texts that do and do not
draw the reader in and allow him or her to “see” the researcher’s discoveries.

14. Post-structuralism and deconstruction have become a significant conceptual force in social science and, especially, in
architecture (Mugerauer, 1994, chap. 3). For deconstructivists, meaning, pattern, and quality are plural, diverse, and
continuously shifting. The aim is relativist interpretation and “deconstruction”—the undermining and dismantling of all
assumed and taken-for-granted givens, be they existential, cultural, historical, political, or aesthetic. The aim is the
freedom to change and to reconstitute oneself continually. To have this shifting freedom, one must vigilantly remember
that all life is a sham and so confront the unintelligible, relative nature of the world and human being (Mugerauer 1988,
p. 67).

On one hand, the potential academic contribution of deconstruction is its unceasing aim to undercut and to question all
taken-for-granted elements of an idea, ideal, lifeway, art work, and so forth. On the other hand, the dangers of
deconstruction are at least two. First, there is a tendency to loose sight of the thing being interpreted and to fall back on
an arbitrary, highly idiosyncratic, understanding of the interpreter. Second, in that deconstruction constantly undermines
understanding, the final result too often is that meaning comes to be seen as meaningless, and hope, beauty, and creative
enterprise are replaced by hopelessness, mediocrity, and nihilism. An excellent discussion of the poststructural-
deconstructivist criticisms of phenomenology is Mugerauer, 1994, especially chap. 6.

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