Speaking and Designing

It may not seem that the language we’re speaking should have much effect on our responses to designed spaces but indeed it does.

We pick up on social cues such as the language being spoken in an area and will, if we are familiar with the culture linked to the language in use, act in accordance with that culture when we are in a space.  So, a person who is bi-lingual in French and Chinese will maintain personal space distances appropriate in France when they hear French but will switch to “Chinese distances” when they people are speaking Chinese.

Different languages use different sorts of systems to discuss the world and those systems determine what aspects of the environment that people note and their experiences and expectations in various situations.  The first language that people speak seems to have this effect through the rest of our lives.  Knowing more about the first languages spoken by people you share a space with, work with, etc., can help you understand how they are affected by various settings.

Different cultures speak about colours in different ways, for example.  In Russian, there are entirely separate words for light and dark blue, for instance (unlike English where an adjective is used with a common base word, “blue,” to make this distinction).  Russians are quicker to spot differences in shades of blue than English speakers.  In Japan, a single word was used to name the hues that in English we separately call “blue” and “green” until relatively recently and in multiple other languages a single word continues to do so—which is why people from these cultures won’t be as tuned in to differences in blues and greens that native English speakers are.  Having to pick a word (even just in our minds) drives the differentiations we make; when the same word can be used for two things we tend to think of those two things similarly. 

Even more interesting, is the fact that when people grow up speaking a language where nouns are linked to a gender by the form to the word “the” that is used with them, as in French (“le” vs. “la”), and Spanish, and German, for instance, that gender influences experiences for decades to come and even when a language without gendered nouns (such as English) is being spoken.  For instance, in some European languages “bridges” are masculine and in others they are feminine.  When they’re masculine, people who grew up speaking that language link masculine design “traits” such as strength, sturdiness, and straight lines to bridges and evaluate bridge designs similarly.  Conversely, when people grow up speaking a language in which “bridges” are more feminine, graceful structures with loads of curving lines get higher scores.

Language is powerful—it structures our interaction with the world around us.