Fable Of The Elephant House Analysis

When experts from different professions join together to invent something, the real obstacle is the focus on common knowledge. Lawrence Wheeler and Ewing Miller (Psychologist and Architect) developed eight functioning principles, that can be used to bring an answer to the designer 's dilemmas. Using “The Fable of the Elephant House”, this paper discusses the working principles that should be considered in interdisciplinary projects. The Fable of the Elephant House illustrates important features. Once upon a time, a planning assembly was set to create a house for an elephant. In the organization were an architect, an interior designer, an engineer, a sociologist, and a psychologist. The elephant was profoundly educated too, but he was

Moral - elephants don 't understand organizations. Or, on a more serious note: the actual problem in planning and design is the prediction of behavior. To assume, to foretell, how people will behave in a formed space, is to have the ability to design that space favorably. Meanwhile, Ewing and Lawrence have gradually found that a few simple principles rest at the roots of our collective aims to resolve a layout and planning problems. First: fundamental problems come from the designer. He must make specific decisions about, physical things and relationships. He doesn 't require an education in social psychology. He wants to know:

What color? How long a corridor? How large space? How close to a window? What temperature? and so on.

From these questions, the behavioral scientist may sort a more generalized problem area, but he will give an undesired service if he tries to create the problems himself. Second: they regard a high efficiency in the systematic questioning of the users of the spaces they design, but the questions must have front soundness for the respondent. They must be relevant to his needs, his health, his hobbies, his success on the job. Highly abstract questions fail. Questions based on floorplans or maps fail if the diagrams are too schematic. A question that irritates a respondent can refute all his answers... So, they lay great stress on relevance, simplicity, and diplomacy in their

Fourth: it is probable to estimate questions in a way that is almost as solid as the paired-comparison technique, is demonstrably better than the straight rank-order method, and is less time-consuming than either. Our system includes a list of options from among which the respondent chooses one - sometimes two - top choices and one - or two - low choices. These options serve, for him, matters of greatest and least relevance in some critical sense specified in the instructions. The scale value for each option, over a group of respondents, is just the item’s percentage share of all positive choices, minus its percentage share of all negative choices. The resulting numbers are not directly comparable to scale values for other sets of items, unless standardized, but the relative strengths of all options are easy to read when these numbers are