[A paper prepared for a symposium, “The Words We Use in Environment-Behavior Research,” organized by Karen Franck, for the annual meeting of EDRA (Environmental Design Research Association), Seattle, Saturday, June 2, 2012. © David Seamon 2012] “Lifeworld” as a Word to Describe People-Environment Intertwinement David Seamon I was phenomenologically inclined even as a child. I remember wondering how the world could be before me—just happening, no one or nothing doing anything—the world just unfolding moment by moment, always already there, one instant before I could catch it. Martin Heidegger termed this instantaneous, always-present presence being-in-the-world, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty used terms like perception, intertwinement, chiasm, and flesh. As a graduate student, I came to phenomenology academically because it was the only conceptual tradition I could find that recognized this remarkable instantaneity of the world and gave it voice in words and concepts. One ontological and epistemological dilemma faced by phenomenological researchers is how to describe in academic language this always-already givenness of the world at hand. From a phenomenological perspective, there is no dualistic person/world or people/environment relationship. Instead, there is only a people-world immersion, entwinement, and commingling whereby what is conventionally understood as two conceptually—person/world, subject/object—is realized as one existentially—person- intertwined-with-world. How accurately to identity and depict this lived wholeness of people-world is a challenging phenomenological problem. I choose the word “lifeworld” to discuss in this symposium because it is one phenomenological concept that sustains the lived wholeness of people-world and insulates one from falling back into the dualistic phrasing of people apart from world or person apart from environment. I still remember vividly the magical moment as a graduate student when I first discovered “lifeworld” and realized its immense conceptual and practical power for describing the automatic, unfolding structure of human life and experience. I deeply respect the word because it speaks accurately to the lived immersion of human beings in worlds—to the dynamic synergy of all the lived parts all of a piece as they unfold. Coined by phenomenological founder Edmund Husserl, the lifeworld is the everyday situation of taken-for-grantedness normally unnoticed and thus hidden as a phenomenon. The lifeworld is simply there. It is life’s latent, normally unexamined givenness that typically goes forward without self-conscious intervention or purposive design. There is an unnoticed, unprompted expectedness. As I prepare morning coffee before I go to bed, I fill the counter pitcher with water, pull out a paper filter, take two tablespoons of coffee from the coffee tin, place the filter in the coffee maker, close the lid, push the coffee maker to the back of the counter, and turn toward the bathroom where I floss and brush my teeth—this entire bedtime routine just happens night after night and requires or wills little self-conscious attention. Much (but not all) of the lifeworld is such regular, pedestrian routines unfolding predictably with no or minimal regulatory guidance. Most of the time, lifeworlds just happen. In this sense, the lifeworld is typically regular and, to an outsider, humdrum, even dreary, though for each person his or her lifeworld is his or her life and mostly a kind of