It’s time to be Familiar!

The end-of-year holidays are the time for familiar, welcoming sights and sounds, smells, and more.

People want to understand how to use a space/thing and that’s easy when something is familiar and so familiar design is often preferred—but that doesn’t mean that everyplace, everything needs to be the same, now and forever.  It means that when we encounter something we need to have some idea how it works. For example:  How will we get this door to open?  Do we push or pull something? Stand in a particular spot?  In this eating space, where should we sit? On the floor? On the foam covered cubes?  Should we sit at all?

When we can’t answer these sorts of basic questions, we are stressed, and stress is the enemy of feeling welcome and having fun.  Whenever we’re stressed, some of our mental processing power is diverted from the task at hand, whether that’s making the punch for a party, figuring out what to say to the fellow guest who has decided to do something to their hair that definitely doesn’t enhance their appearance, or coordinating the heating up of the canapes, for instance.  When we’re stressed, we also are grouchy, Grinch-like companions—which does not do much for the ambiance of any gathering we might be attending?

Holiday times can be an opportunity for you to be bolder, design-wise, than at other times of the year, as long as you anticipate that the people experiencing what you design are more probably in a good than not-so-good mood.  When stress levels rise and moods drop, supplying more familiar sorts of options to support “anticipatable” situations (for example, for sleeping and relaxing in bedrooms), for furniture and how it is arranged, for lighting, etc., become an increasingly desirable option.   When we’re less stressed and in generally better moods, the amount of effort we’re willing to put into thinking about how to be somewhere or use something unlike what we’ve encountered before goes up.

Being in a more familiar sort of place also boosts our trust in whomever is providing it to us, which is often handy in shared situations—and this increase in trust potentially extends to whomever we’re experiencing and area with.

For many a holiday movie fan, an in-their-dreams familiar space to spend the holidays is a rustic wooden cabin in the woods, surrounded by piles of the brilliantly white cottony snow falling from the sky.  Reality is not likely to align too closely with movie set magic—many of us spend our holidays gathered around suburban dining room tables with relatives and friends.  Being around the usual table means we’re likely to be able to do the “customary” things we fill our time with at the end of the year—whether that’s gently debating politics with old chums or baking Christmas cookies with younger cousins or something else entirely—and perpetuating those sorts of positive rituals is great for us.

Preserving end of year rituals helps us keep track of the passage of time, just like circadian lighting does, but over the span of a year and not a day.  That helps us maintain an upbeat, lower energy mood, perfect for relaxing and thinking up New Year’s resolutions or tricks to play on late risers—for our brains to do our very best work!  Also, when we’re in the sort of good mood that comes from having the same centrepiece this year as holidays of yore, we’re more likely to be in pleasant minglers, conversing in a friendly and relaxed way with the people around us.

And thinking familiarity at its grandest scale—biophilic design (discussed here) is, when you get down to it, a preference for familiar positive experiences from long, long ago.