Zonings

Zones, whether they’re created by walls or via darker and lighter (more brightly lit) spaces drive our activities in powerful and useful ways.

• It is important to acknowledge, right off the bat, that we can create zones within a structure (or outside it) in a variety of ways, some of which are more architectural (for example, walls and doors and variations in ceiling heights) and others that are more based in interior design, such as lighting of different colours, edges of rugs, and furniture arrangements, for instance. We can also zone an area by the time of day.  A room can be a professional home office sometimes and a family dining area otherwise.
• Honesty is always the best policy and particularly when creating zones. Often zoning is coupled with magical thinking.  If you are creating a study space for your children, and placing it near the area where you will watch movies with your partner as your children study, they will not be able to learn effectively in the area you’ve set aside, the distractions from those movies will degrade their learning ability—without serious soundproofing, and soundproofing curtains just won’t do the trick.  You can’t effectively do your job, at least if it involves professional knowledge work-type thinking in an area adjoining a space where your young children will play (even if they don’t keep popping over for permission to get snacks, etc.)  There need to be significant buffers around any areas where people need to concentrate or focus.
• Our minds can only do their best work when the design of the place they’re in aligns with the activity to be performed there, whether that activity is doing our takes or coming up with a new advertising slogan. So, as discussed in this article, we need clear zones for more thoughtful activities, just as we do for more physical, active ones (designing for these is reviewed here).
• Homes need to provide opportunities for people to spend time apart, just as they need to support socializing. Privacy, and how to supply it, are discussed in detail in this article. Designing to support positive mingling is discussed in this one.  For that matter, they also need to prompt people to eat healthy foods (covered in this article) and do a myriad of other things which we’ve discussed in previous issues and can be searched in our index (one more example:  here we cover designing sleeping spaces).
• Within any zone, for any coordinated activity, all the seats for people who will be talking should be the same height off the floor or all on the floor. When some people are being physically looked up at and others are being looked down on, conversations are distorted, as discussed in this article.  In short, the people who are being looked up at are perceived as more adult, more respected, powerful and experienced, than those who are being looked down on.  Trustworthiness increases as we match eye levels.
• Some personality types prefer more rigorously-enforced space zoning than others, as discussed in this article.