Creating your new home office
For some this could be the most important space in the home now we are working remotely more as a result of Covid 19 and Lockdown. We have lots of tips on how to...
Creating places to mingle in your home
Places where people will have positive, pleasant conversations: Will allow everyone who wants to make eye contact at any time they feel like it. Parties require the sorts of everyone sits in a ring...
Stress in the City
How to design a city? Mazumder reports that during his dissertation research he found that “participants were brought into an urban environment, in the real world, but also via virtual reality, through the use...
Which face mask is best?
How easy or difficult is it to understand someone wearing different sorts of face masks? Researchers lead by Brown determined via data collected from people with normal hearing that “cotton masks with filter inserts...
Carefully consider the Cart
This is an interesting one. Ever wondered why shopping trolley handles are the way they are? Ever wondered if they were designed differently how that would affect our spending habits? Well, Estes and Streicher...
Post Pandemic Homes
Neuroscience is clear about the sorts of homes where people will live their best future lives, particularly if future pandemics arise. In these spaces: There will likely be a sort of transition zone as...
Encouraging Good Behaviour
Do you have a house of unruly inhabitants? Or work with a bunch of messy sausages? Well, here at The Space Doctors are here to help! Design can encourage people to behave in ways...
Pantone’s Colour for 2022
Pantone has decided that the colour of the year 2022 is Very Peri, a warm periwinkle. This colour will challenge users in the year ahead: It’s pretty energizing to look at, so it’s not...
Green Cities are Good for Kids
Binter and colleagues looked at how urban design affects child development. They share that they “investigated the association between early-life urban environment and cognitive and motor function in children. We used data from 5403...
Remote Working… Are you Talking about Me?
As we are currently moving into a hybrid way of working there is a lot of discussion about how to manage remote and in-office teams. A recent article in the New York Times discussed...
Textures Matter, Even for Robots
Umeda lead a research team that found that “Body texture, such as softness or elasticity, is an important consideration in the design of robots meant for interactive functions. . . . researchers asked adult participants...
Virtual Reality Realism Matters
Newman and colleagues determined that “High realism VR environments provided a greater sense of presence and restoration. Realism is important, particularly for environmental restoration research. . . . Two studies were conducted to examine...
Banking Happiness
Faraji-Rad and Lee determined that “Merely anticipating a future sad event motivates consumers to ‘accumulate happiness’ in order to enhance their ability to cope with the anticipated sadness later—a phenomenon that we call banking...
Living with Stress
Goldring and Bolger investigated how daily stressors influence lives and found that “Prior research shows that daily stressors lead to greater psychological distress. A separate body of research links daily stressors to physical symptoms...
The Space in the Place!
As a gift for Christmas, The Space Doctors have written another poem for you in the style of Dr Seuss! We hope you enjoy it! If you would like your very own higher resolution PDF...
How to throw a great party!
THE ENVIRONMENTAL NEUROSCIENCE OF A GREAT PARTY (THE KIND OF TITLE THAT DEFINITELY DESTROYS THE FUN) ‘Tis the time of year for parties—and in many parts of the world, with the right disease fighting...
How to Encourage Conversation at a Party
Science makes it clear that there are some hard and fast rules about spaces where people have great conversations—you can apply them throughout your home, creating multiple conversation zones—even if you don’t have any...
How to make Food taste nicer! The Definitive Guide!
So, you’ve got people coming over and you’d like them to leave with memories of eating all sorts of yummy (and if you’re really hardcore, nutritious) food at your party—and you definitely don’t want...
Holiday Colours
There are particular hues that we’re much more likely to see at the end of the year and in related celebrations than others. Don’t be surprised if they have you feeling in very particular...
Time for the Familiar!
During the holidays, and actually throughout the year, familiar really can be best—we do like spaces to change or evolve slightly over time and even to vary slightly by time of day or season...
Scent and Heat!
At this time of year we can become particularly attuned to the smells in our homes and offices, regularly because they’re not very good. If you actively manage the scents in your home and...
Refreshment time!
During the holidays, we often need to not only work at whatever our job is but also spend time catching up with family, friends, and colleagues, all of this can lead us desperate to...
Are you arguing with your designer?
If you are, don’t be surprised—the two of you bring very different mindsets to any design discussion. Designers have spent a lot of time thinking about design (no surprise there). Even if you’ve been...
Does remote working impact collaboration?
With so many of us working from home, maybe for the first time or even continuing a trend, this research is important when considering the need to create environments to encourage collaboration. Yang and...
Does Zoom affect the rhythm of our conversation?
Boland and colleagues have learned that “Small, variable transmission delays over Zoom disrupt the typical rhythm of conversation, leading to delays in turn initiation. This study compared local and remote (Zoom) turn transition times....
Can ‘celebrity’ increase your property price?
There used to be a series called “Through the Keyhole“. I don’t know if you remember that? Anyway, there has been some research that appears to prove that if your house was lived in...
Why do some things become clutter?
Ever wondered why some of your stuff becomes clutter? Jonah Berger has written a paper with Jacqueline Rifkin (“How Nonconsumption Can Turn Ordinary Items Into Perceived Treasures”) that indicates why some items become “clutter.”...
Open the windows!
Want to perform better? Joseph Allen, Director, Harvard’s Healthy Buildings program, details in a recent article in The Atlantic (free at the web address below) why ventilation, particularly in workplaces, is important: “My team...
Birdsong makes us happy
Ever wondered what soundtrack to play when you’re stressed? Turn on the birdsong. Ratcliffe confirms the value of nature soundtracks. Via a literature review she determined that “nature is broadly characterized by the sounds...
Keep warm and feel safe
The warmer we are the safer we feel. Hornstein, Fanselow, and Eisenberger link feeling something warm feeling safe: “a physically warm stimulus was less readily associated with threat (compared to soft or neutral stimuli;...
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