Don’t always Follow Trends…
A lot of people make a lot of money creating and publicising trends, in design and elsewhere. They’d like you to think that your only option as a rational human being is to follow...
Buy the Right Lightbulb for the Right Spot!
The lighting research is clear: Warm light, particularly when it’s dimmer, helps us feel relaxed, creative, and sociable.It’s no coincidence that the Scandinavian way-of-life, hygge (described in detail here), features candles and firelight. Cooler...
Power Scenting!
One of the most often bemoaned side effects of COVID-19 was loss of sense of smell. Why? Because smelling the world around us has a powerful effect on our wellbeing, how we think and...
Ventilating a Space!
You may or may not have much control over the ventilation where you live or work, you may be able to open or close a window or be able to change the flow rate...
Sounds Good!
When our ears are happy, the odds get pretty good that the rest of us is as well. What can you do to create an acoustic haven? Keep echoes down.Echoing stresses us out. Use...
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...
Let there be light – the power of Circadian Rhythms
Figueiro and Pedler make useful suggestions related to circadian lighting: “Open the window shades in your home or office but be careful to avoid creating glare. . . . When sitting by a window,...
Garden!
Fjaestad and team’s work confirms the value of gardening; they learned via data gathered from people 46 to 80 years old that “Compared to participants who did not engage in gardening, those who gardened...
Block out Traffic Noise
Block Out Traffic Noise Huang and colleagues’ work confirms the value of soundproofing in-town residential walls. The researchers report that “Road traffic noise was estimated at baseline residential address using the common noise assessment...
Get your Kids into Nature
Li and Sullivan determined that when “Perceived childhood nature exposure was calculated as a cumulative score based on the perceived nature in residential surroundings from up to three childhood home locations weighted by duration...
Why Objects Matter
Sharfenberger and associates determined that “being physically close to objects helps consumers to feel psychologically close to the more abstract meaning of these objects. Four experimental studies . . . indicate that being proximal...
Closer Greenspace Less Likelihood of Postpartum Depression
Sun and colleagues found that “A reduced risk for PPD [postpartum depression was associated with total green space exposure based on street-view measure [500 m buffer. . .], but not NDVI [normalized difference vegetation...
Living Your Best Life in a Small Space – Intro
Living small is living thoughtfully. You may be living small for all sorts of reasons, but it’s unlikely that you’re doing so by mistake. To actually live and work in a small space, and...
Living Green in a Small Space
Why you or someone you care about has decided to live in a tiny home influences what you can do to make living in one a pleasant experience. Some of the reasons that people...
Wellbeing and Small Spaces
So, how can you design living and working small spaces that increase your wellbeing and, gasp, your pleasure?= Keeping our early days as a species in mind, when we may even on occasion have...
Entertaining in a Small Space
Whether you’ll be able to entertain any but the very closest of friends in your tiny space will depend a lot on the space. If you can set up a seating area to share,...
Minimalistic Living
There’s a lot of push today for living in a minimalist way. Aaargh! Using resources thoughtfully is always a good idea, for many a reason, from saving the earth, to conserving your bank balance,...
Eating in darkness…
Veronique Greenwood’s article (“Some Restaurants Around the World Offer Dining With a Difference – Guests Eat in Complete Darkness. How Does This Change the Way We Taste?” 2023, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230411-what-dining-in-the-dark-does-to-your-tastebuds ) really gets you thinking...
Sunlight
Vermeer has been the darling of the art world, and loads of people outside that hallowed circle, for years, and in “Why We Want to Live (and Work) in That Vermeer Light” Emily Barger...
Plants Prevail
As they do most Springs when plants revive outside, plants inside are a hot topic. In “Eight Ways Indoor Plants Can Improve Your Home” (2023, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230324-eight-ways-indoor-plants-can-improve-your-home) Dominic Lutyens shares that worldwide “a trend for...
Storage is Your Friend
Many of us have lots of stuff. We live in a society that gives us lots of options of things we might buy, and then encourages us to make many purchases, even ones we...
Managing your at-work Energy Levels…
A Zhang-lead team found “a time allocation effect, such that for a given period of the workday (i.e., the morning or the afternoon), the greater the proportion of time a knowledge worker spent in...
We like what we know
Darda and colleagues share that they “we explored Northern American and Indian participants’ aesthetic judgments and preferences for abstract and representational artworks. . . . no evidence was found for an ingroup bias ....
Do our preferences change?
Aleem and Grzywacz looked at our responses to aesthetics over time and report that “A handful of studies that have measured aesthetic preferences at multiple moments show that preferences may change in as little...
Birdsong and Wellbeing
Hammoud and colleagues report that they “used the Urban Mind smartphone application to examine the impact of seeing or hearing birds on self-reported mental wellbeing in real-life contexts. . . . Everyday encounters with...
Language and Judgements
Rizzo and team’s work indicates how important word choice is for conclusions drawn; they found that “sensory language (e.g., words like ‘crumble’ and ‘juicy’ that engage the senses) shapes consumer responses to influencer-sponsored content....
Assessing Art
Kuhnapfel and colleagues report that “in a gallery-like setting . . . we tracked movements of participants that engaged an abstract artwork. . . . moving more/more dynamically related to more reported insight. ....
Create Refreshing Views – Garden Design 101!
We’re not apt to think how our gardens can work for us, the way our home offices and kitchens do. Your garden can refresh your mind and cut your stress levels just as it...
Biophilically Designed Gardens
The gardens that have the most positive effects on our minds and our bodies actively apply important principles of biophilic design. We have discussed biophilic design in detail in here (and search in our...
What to hear in your Garden?
Listening to just the right sorts of nature sounds can be as cognitively refreshing and good at reducing our stress levels as seeing nature, in real life or in photos or videos, all of...
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