Research on sustainable design often emphasizes the biophysical aspects of the environment and tends to neglect its social aspects. However, since we live in a world dominated by humans, our perception of and behaviours in the environment inevitably affect the way the environment is used and protected. The idea of sustainability is thus concerned with maintaining not only an ecological system but also a social system. Based on a review of the recent literature on environment-behaviour studies (EBS) and environmental sustainability, this paper discusses the significance of the perceptual aspect of sustainable design, and explicates the need for research in this area. The paper proposes a new conceptual model to address this aspect, then argues that the concept of environmental preference serves as a research tool to underpin empirical study. Environmental preference measures the degree to which individuals like certain environments. Although the concept has provided important insights into the interaction between people and the environment in fields such as visual resource management, little research has investigated environmental preferences for sustainable design. The paper points out several relevant issues that deserve future research.

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This study was conducted to research the following; Relationship between residential environment and assessment. which included six factors: "facilities", "convenience", "physical environments", "residence", "privacy", "situation of community"; Relationship between residential environment, and preference for their community. The subjects consisted of four hundred residents inhabiting the detached houses and the apartment houses in Nakano and Sumida Ward, Tokyo. The results showed as follows: (1) All residents' attributes made significant differences between in the detached houses and in the apartment houses. (2) "convenience" was the highest mean of six factors; "facilities" and "convenience" in Nakano Ward were more highly assessed than them in Sumida Ward; "Residence" in the detached houses was more highly assessed than it in the apartment houses. (3) A lot of correlations among six factors were significant; Correlation between "residence" and residential environment was the highest. (4) Except the result of Sumida Ward, both "residence" and "convenience" had significant effects on residential environment; In Sumida Ward, only a "residence" affected significantly residential environment. (5) Preference for their community was significantly related to residential environment.

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This study argues a development and a proposal of "graphical presentation" of the distribution of solid angle ratio and its semantic components of faces that compose the hierarchical structure of the scene of architecture. As Gibson asserts, this kind of the structure of the informations are considered to play an important role in human functioning of perception. The target of the study are 2 images of the exteriors of single buildings taken by 35mm perspective control lens and 2 images of the exteriors of multiple dwelling houses taken by the 180° lens for projection in solid angles. Each faces of the region segmented images were divided into 5 to 7 layers depending on the depth of the hierarchy of the nested structures. Solid angle ratio [%] is defined as the ratio of each segmented region compared with a free setting region on the whole globe. The codes of identity, structure and meaning are defined as solid angle ratios of faces, inter-relational components between faces and English titles of faces. The author calculated with a computer to draw trees that indicate the nested structures among those faces. The series of tree drawings shows that detailed solid angle ratios and nested structures belong to the factors which determine the scene of architecture that cannot be explained only by the solid angles of sky, building and ground. The visual images that we are felt in the environment are not only by the identity or the structure as morphological informations, but also by the semantic informations that have depth in the hierarchy.

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