b. What is Responsiveness? The term “responsive” may not be the best one to use since, only living things respond, expect metaphorically. Thus it is difficult to ask: to what dose environment respond? What responds? What dose “respond” mean? How dose one know environment responsive?
It may be useful, then, to reformulate this objective. This can be done in several ways which, again, are not contradictory but merely different and possibly complementary. Each one contributes to a clarification of what it is one is trying to achieve.
One way of looking at the problem is to think of environment as being congruent with culture or, rather, as we have seen, in terms of certain parts of environments (which?) being congruent with certain parts of culture (which). One still needs to know what “congruence” is and how one evaluates it, which, as mentioned above, is not an easy task.
Another way is to think of design as being culture-specific, i.e. that built forms will have certain qualities which will differ for different cultures, as they relate to certain parts of the culture, particularly its core.
One could reformulate the objective to state that responsive environments are those which can be manipulated or changed as culture changes, i.e. open-ended, flexible and adaptive environments. That is certainly one meaning of “responsive.” On the other hand, continuity, stability and guidance are also necessary. One can then begin to find out which parts of the environment need to be open-ended(this will be culturally variable); who specifically needs to do the manipulating; when in the process it need to be done, etc. The responsiveness of open-endedness(and hence participation) is not enough—it is necessary but not sufficient.
A responsive environment can be understood as one which can be manipulated in another sense---as an active component of culture, used as an element of that culture rather than as a passive container of culture, as it were.
Finally, responsiveness can be reformulated in a way which I have recently found rather useful---as a supportive environment. It is then possible to specify the conditions, of high criticality, under which high supportiveness is essential and then one can ask:
What is being supported?
How is being supported?
By what is being supported?
This is, I think, an approach which can be used in design, for example in the case of developing countries. I mention developing countries neither because of their intrinsic importance nor because they are necessarily of major interest to readers of JAE (Journal of Architectural Education). They provided a useful starting point for getting into the issues we have been discussing. This is because it is a useful technique, used in anthropology, psychology and science generally, to look first at extreme situations and, having understood the principles, to move on to more subtle ones. Many of the things I have been discussing are seen most clearly, not to say starkly, and best studied, in such contexts. There criticality is high, hence the effects of environment on culture and vice-versa are strong. Rapid culture changes enable one to identify core vs. peripheral elements, those elements changing rapidly vs. those remaining relatively constant. The critical culture and physical elements can be identified; failures are also more catastrophic. Finally, traditional vernacular and spontaneous environment abound and provide valuable lessons.