Salt Lake Tribune . Course Goals 1. To increase your sensitivity to the physical environment and to enable you to break your habits of taking physical environments for granted. Physical environments are not simply backgrounds against which human action takes place. Physical environments are interdependent with all human processes.
Physical environments reflect, shape, and channel human assumptions, beliefs, feelings, and actions.
To truly understand the physical environment, one must understand the way that environment is bound up in human social, cultural, and economic processes. Taking the physical environment seriously requires that you take other aspects of the physical context seriously. Because environments often remain unexamined, a closer look can reveal many contradictions between the ways in which we think about environments and the ways they actually operate. Larger human systems, such as laws, cultural customs, and economic systems, achieve tangible reality to the extent that they help constitute your immediate physical setting and suggest the behaviors that can or cannot take place there. Similarly, co-existing physical settings, such as home and neighborhood, are relevant to one another to the extent that they reinforce, prohibit, or require certain physical or behavioral forms and actions.