A Reflection on Environmental Quality and Meaning

Improving environmental quality is interwoven with enhancing its meaning. Semantic factors are applied to evaluate quality and the indicators of the two concepts of quality and meaning overlap. However, theorists’ viewpoints toward these two concepts are diverse so that some consider meaning as a quality indicator, while others refer to quality merely as the outcome of the presentational aspect of meaning. This has led to an ambiguity in determining the relationship between the aspects of these two concepts and, as a result, made it difficult to consent to what is implied as meaning or quality. The current study aims at clarifying the differences and the common points of the aspects and factors of the two concepts of meaning and quality, and determining their relationship, so that an agreement could be reached on these two fundamental concepts in both architecture hypothesis and criticism. Applying logical reasoning, this research defines a coherent general framework based on human-environment interaction, in which the position of each of the two concepts of meaning and quality is explained. Also, cognitive aspects of the environment, using the method of content analysis and literature coding, are categorized as the basis for matching and comparing the aspects of the two concepts. These two frameworks would function as the basis for search of and response to the ambiguities in the relationship between these two which, ultimately, would lead to the statement. In human-environment interaction, meaning undergoes perception and cognition, while quality is judged and evaluated. What is evaluated as the quality is the presentation and the final result of the cognition of the threefold aspects of the meaning, including functional, social and responsive. If the responsive meaning of an environment bears a positive affective load, the environment is considered to possess a good quality.