Your Personality and Your In-City Home

Although there’s always the chance (day or night) to pop out of an urban residence, it’s even more important that that a home in the city aligns with your personality than that one outside the city does as you’ll likely have less outdoor nature in the city to escape to when things get tough.  We’ve talked about considering your personality, and the personalities of people you will share a space with, when you create spaces to live and work in this article.

Psychologists doing the most rigorous sorts of personality research categorize people on continuums of extraverted to introverted, more or less conscientious, more or less agreeable, being more or less open to non-standard experiences and being more or less emotionally stable (these factors are, altogether known as the Big-5).

To quickly assess your personality or someone else’s using the Big-5 system, use the questions here.

Some of the most important concepts to consider when you are doing personality-conscious design are:

• Extraverts and introverts thrive, and their brains work most effectively, in different sorts of places. Extraverts don’t process incoming information from their eyes, ears, nose, skin, and taste buds as effectively as introverts do, so they function better (doing work that requires concentration, having pleasant conversations with others, you name it) when they are in a more energizing space, while the reverse is true for introverts.  Sensory stimulation comes from many sources, including being around other people (there’s nothing that revs us up as fast as being near someone else, in our long ago past when we weren’t actively responding to what others of our type were up to we ran the risk of ending up hungry, thirsty, or some bigger, meaner animal’s lunch). Certain colours, patterns, scents, and textures are more energizing than others, as discussed in these articles or these for instance.  Extraverts work more effectively in open spaces than introverts do, but distractions are the enemy of the best work for all of us.   Extraverts and people open to novel experiences are even more likely to prefer high energy, more saturated colours than introverts; almost every place is shared, however, which means even the least saturated colours have their chance to shine in communal spaces.  (The same study that linked extraversion and openness to a preference for saturated colours also found that people wearing more saturated colours or seen in front of walls painted more saturated colours were perceived to be more extraverted and open than when they were categorized wearing other clothes, etc.). Extraverts are likely to create, and to like being in, spaces that invite people to interact with each other, because seats are arranged so that people in a group can see each other’s faces, for instance.
• People who are more open get a bigger kick out of design solutions that are novel, but all of us need to have familiar experiences, at least some of the time, as discussed in this article. Openness to new experiences can explain why you can’t get enough of furnishings, upholstery patterns, etc., that are unlike those you’ll find in your friends’ homes while your sister can’t break from the customary/traditional.  Options that they perceive as intellectually stimulating will be particularly popular with people who score high on openness.

• If space users are at the more conscientious end of the spectrum, and all else is equal (colours, etc.,) go with the design option that has more straight lines than curving ones (but do make sure there are at least a few curving lines (in two- or three-dimensions) in every space). If you or someone you share a space with is relatively more conscientious, things that seem neat, well-ordered, and well-maintained, and design that supports a “planned” life, will be popular in your home/office (and people in a neater space are seen as more conscientious by others, which is important in offices, for example).   “Conscientiousness” has implications for the gathering of storage bins, etc., that tuck the inevitable stuff out of sight, drawers packed with organizers, creating a space where design elements seem curated and carefully “placed” (i.e., not thrown together as if by the random winds of a hurricane), and using materials, initially, that hold up well over time.  If a surface can easily be scratched up and thereby visually degraded, it is likely to make the conscientious among us tense and result in re-do’s, which leads to inefficient use of resources, natural, financial, and otherwise.  Those who are conscientious also prefer that things, such as water heating systems be up-to-date; antiques can be lovely, but if they don’t do their jobs they make those who are conscientious tense. Plan for order and efficiency for the conscientious and you can’t go wrong.  People who are conscientious are slightly better at filtering out extraneous sensory information, such as things that they hear, than others, but distraction management is key for anyone who is focusing on what they’re thinking about.
• People who are relatively more agreeable seem to be less materialistic than others, which can be handy when storage space is scare. People who are agreeable value harmony, and that has implications for designing for socializing (discussed ) and for equitable divisions of resources/opportunities when all cannot have all that they might wish (so, bedrooms of siblings would be equal size, for instance, when someone who’s agreeable is allocating space).  The agreeables among us (along with people who are conscientious) are also particularly likely to enjoy representational (e.g., impressionistic as opposed to abstract) art.
• Individuals who are less emotionally stable (which is sometimes described as being more neurotic) can be concerned about having to make eye contact for longer than they’d like (so some sort of fish tank or plant or art or window view or something else to which people can gracefully divert their eyes from time to time, breaking eye contact without seeming rude is handy) and personal space invasions (which supports using ample sofas along which people can array themselves as they see fit and chairs that can be slightly shifted without any obvious effort to comfortable distances apart). People who are more emotionally stable will do knowledge work type thinking at a higher level in a more open space, one with less visual and acoustic shielding, than people who are less emotionally stable. Interestingly, those who are less emotionally stable can find viewing urban scenes as refreshing as people who are more emotionally stable find looking at natural ones. The less emotionally stable are also particularly concerned, when buying a home, for instance, about how likely it is that a property will be a mentally refreshing place to spend time.

• Research has shown links between where people live and their personalities. Individuals who are more open to experience are more likely to prefer areas that have denser and more ethnically diverse populations as well as more people who are open, while individuals who are more agreeable live their best lives in greener areas with many families living nearby.  In general, people in urban areas tend to be more open and extraverted than the population at large.  Extraverts also tend to live in and prefer more walkable urban areas than introverts.