Coordinating Our Thinking About Sensory Experiences
Scheller and Sui report that “When interacting with the environment, humans exhibit robust biases toward information that pertains to themselves: Self-relevant information is processed faster and yields more accurate responses than information linked to...
Mindfulness Better Unaided
Macaulay and teammates report that “Before and after a 20-minute outdoor experience, participants . . . completed surveys. . . . Participants were randomly allocated to one of four engagement intervention groups: mindful engagement,...
Living Near Green Space and Brain Performance
Jimenez and colleagues link exposure to green space and higher levels of cognitive functioning. They share that that by studying data from 13,594 women (mean age 61), they determined that “increasing green space was...
Working in the Metaverse
Wondering what it might be like to work in the metaverse? Read this article to find out more. Sam Gilbert, the author of the linked to article reports, for example that “The metaverse 1.0...
Place matters, The Places you go….
Whether it’s at work, at school, in a hospital, or even in a shop, we find ourselves in environments that we haven’t designed ourselves. In the paragraphs that follow, we’ll explore why and how...
Fun, Fun, until you have to focus…
There are multiple problems with trying to ‘design in’ fun or playfulness. Different people have different ideas about what’s fun, for example. The only way to even possibly add fun to a workplace is...
Eyes and Ears at Work
In multiple articles we’ve talked about sensory experiences that are relaxing (looking at colours that are not very saturated but relatively light like a sage green with lots of white mixed into it, for...
More sights, smells and feels at work
Over the issues we’ve published we’ve talked several times about home office design, for example here, and all the things that we’ve told you about colour, scents, etc., and your performance and wellbeing in...
Biophilic Design in Workplaces
All those plants you see around your workplace are not there by chance. Research consistently shows that being able to see a couple of plants (not more) as you work boost your cognitive performance,...
Being in control
You’ve probably noticed that sometimes designers and managers give you choices at work—where to sit, whether window blinds are open or closed, the height of your desk—and there’s a research-based reason for that. When...
Designing for Team Work
We meet differently in different sorts of spaces according to the research and lots of workplace designers and managers make sure that there are a range of areas available for people to get together. ...
Hearing the right “silent” messages
Space designers and managers are also really focused on you getting the right messages from what they provide. Some research studies have found that the nonverbal messages that you pull from your workplace have...
Other random but important stuff..
There’s another reason that things all start to look familiar from one space to another that designers and managers know about. When a space at a company looks like we expect it to look...
Healing Spaces
Healing spaces have probably been researched more extensively than any other sort of place (largely because it’s so easy to quantify the results of design actions taken there; after something changes more or less...
Stores
Certain conditions in stores make it more likely that we’ll make purchases and enjoy doing so. Research also indicates that most of the conditions that boost sales in physical stores also do so online,...
Learning Spaces
Learning is thinking so it should come as no surprise that most of the research that has been implemented in workplaces—regarding natural light, plants, visual clutter, views, etc.—has also been applied in classrooms. Research...
As the video gets worse, we start to shout…
Researchers have determined that “The more the video quality of an online meeting degrades, the louder we start talking, a new study by researchers at Radboud University and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics...
Feel less Frazzled
Even in our world’s best of times, life isn’t always the best-est and our planet’s current predicaments seem to move all of our societies’ wellbeing scores from middle of the road, neither terrible nor...
How to use Sound?
A few of us actively soundscape the worlds in which we live, but way too many of us just let sound happen to us, which is an opportunity missed. To calm yourself via your...
How to use Scent?
Now that you’ve considered what you’re hearing, it’s time to think about what you’re smelling as you try to decompress: Smelling lavender helps you relax (it also encourages you to be more trusting of...
What we See and Touch
It probably won’t surprise you at all to know that touching soft things, such like the flannels that baby pyjamas are made of, is relaxing. If you want to banish the stress demons, make...
Clear that Clutter once and for all!
Visual clutter, known in the psych trade as visual complexity, is a sure-fire way to work your internal stress meter up to dangerous levels.If getting rid of clutter was straightforward, however, you would already...
How to REALLY relax in a Space?
To really relax in a space, people need to feel in control of it, that no one can intrude visually or acoustically without their permission—in other words, no one can see or hear them...
How to Travel Stress-Free?
Many of us now are starting to travel again (hurray!) outside our own car—but travel is stressful—we’re packed into airplanes, trains, and buses as close as sardines (sometimes it seems closer) and don’t have...
Theatre for conversation
There are ways that design can make it more likely that you’ll have a constructive, mutually-beneficial conversation with someone else—whether you’re trying to negotiate world peace or help your teenager understand that they do...
Things to note as you travel
Some things to note as you begin to travel far from home again: Climate varies dramatically based on distance from the equator and leads people to want to use spaces in different ways.For example,...
More Walkable, Lower Healthcare Costs
New research confirms that walkability is good for us. Wali and colleagues examined “high resolution data for 476 participants in the Rails and Health study on health care costs, mode specific MVPA[ moderate-to-vigorous physical...
Where we grew up affects whether we get lost or not…
Ever wondered why some people you know always seem lost? Coutrot and colleagues report that “how the environment in which one grew up affects later cognitive abilities remains poorly understood. Here we used a...
How Music shapes our Accuracy
Santangelo and associates report that “music is frequently played while we are engaged in other activities that rely on decision-making (e.g., driving). . . . We analyzed response times and accuracy from more than...
It makes sense, so I see it better!
Rossel and teammates report that “Our study investigated the influence of expectations based on prior experience and contextual information on the perceived sharpness of objects and scenes… We manipulated the availability of relevant information...
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