Investigation of the Environmental Factors Affecting the Sociability and Their Importance; Case Study: Architecture Education Environment

The role of the architecture education environment as an influential model in the mental pattern of the architecture students and their education as future professional architects is of significance. According to the practical nature of the architecture lessons that require the students’ presence and their interaction to improve the learning process, it can be supposed that through creating sociability as a qualitative feature of the education environment, the students’ learning can be improved. The current research studies the influential environmental factors on the sociability in the architecture education environment that its features can contribute to improving and facilitating the learning process. Therefore, the main research question is which influential factors affect sociability in the physical environment of architecture education, and what are the relationships between them, and how much is their relative weight? Therefore, after identifying the initial concepts, the suggested model of the influential factors was presented through logical analysis and deductive reasoning. Then, the validity of the recommended model in the architecture education environment was measured using Fuzzy Delphi methods. In the next step, the DEMATEL method was applied to measure the relationships between the factors, and using the Analytic Network Process (ANP), the significance and weight of each one of the factors were evaluated. The obtained results presented six groups of the influential factors on the sociability in the architecture education environment that are as follows: physical elements, architectural-spatial factors, aesthetics meanings, sense of security, perceptual-meaning, and activity-functional. Physical elements and architectural-spatial factors were obtained as causal variables among the main factors that have a strong driving power and weak dependence in the design of the sociability in the architecture education environment. Also, activity-functional factors gained the maximum weight and significance among the main factors.