Soundscaping for Better Moods
Your ears need a break! Every day they seem to be bombarded by the sounds of machines and other people that seem like they will drive you mad. But you can take steps to...
Designing for Creativity
As the new year dawns, many of us decide to spend time at creative endeavours, and design can help with that! The findings that follow are place-independent; they hold, and can be applied, whether...
Curvy Spaces
Tawil and colleagues’ found that “Previous research suggests that curved vs. angular interior environments trigger affective (e.g., preference). . . . responses. . . . Online participants . . . undertook four randomized tasks...
Feeling with your Fingertips – the Long Read
Humans have lots of skin, with lots of nerves embedded in it. All those nerves are churning away, second after second, sending millions of impulses to your brain – giving you all sorts of...
Feeling not with your Fingertips – from your feet to your butt!
We don’t just have nerve endings in our fingertips and tactile experiences from the soles of our feet as we walk, from our butts as we sit, etc., also influence our experiences in a...
Things we learned in 2023
In 2023, researchers have reported that: Symmetrical things seem more functional and reliable and asymetical ones more fun and exciting—useful information when you’re making choices. At-work sound volumes of about 50 dBA are best;...
Designing New Year’s Resolutions – The Long Read
As one year ends and another begins we’re driven to think about the high and low points of the last 12 months and to plan for the next 12, and beyond. All of which...
Keeping your New Year’s Resolutions
Looking for tips for keeping your New Year’s resolutions? Look no further: Open the curtains and let in the natural light. We not only process information more effectively in natural light, our cognitive performance...
Design – Sending Silent Signals
As The Space Doctors has discussed oodles of times, human beings continually “read” the world around themselves, trying to determine what it has to “say.” All of which sounds like a lot of mumbo-jumbo,...
Biophilic School Design – Great for Students, Teachers, and the Planet They Live On
When biophilic design principles are applied at places where people are learning and teaching, good things happen—moods and cognitive performance improve (for students and teachers!)—which is always a plus, whether trigonometry or Latin grammar...
The Value of Biophilic Design
The neuroscience research makes it very, very clear that being in a biophilicly designed space elevates our wellbeing. Need proof of the value of indoor biophilicly designed spaces? Here’s a representative sample of research...
Curvaceous Houses
A November article in The New York Times talks about the many curving design elements in environments created by Polish Brazilian designer Jorge Zalszupin (Michael Snyder, 2023, “Wacky, Curvaceous Houses in Brazil That Feel...
Treehouses!
What could be more biophilic than a treehouse? In October, Tow Vanderbilt reported on the treehouses designed by Takeshi Kobayashi (“A Treehouse Builder Who Creates Impermanence: Japan’s Takashi Kobayashi Has Found Freedom in the...
Sharing Spaces – The Long Read
The season of mingling is upon us! It seems that most of us pack in the majority of time we spend socializing with others during the last few months of the year. People have...
Daylight reduces burnout
A team lead by Ziabari found that “The research question was to identify the connection between daylight, nature-view windows, and hospital staff burnout during Covid-19. . . . Three questionnaires were used: demographic, physical...
Learning Tricks from Set Design!
People creating movie, TV, and stage sets often need to be really ingenious. The things they lavish the most attention to likely have powerful effects on our experience of space. As Alexis Soloski (2023,...
Nostalgia
Design can encourage people to feel nostalgic, using images, objects, or scents, for example. Abeyta and Juhl’s work, building on previous studies, “hypothesized that nostalgia, a bittersweet emotion that entails reflecting sentimentally on the...
Awe
Design can make it more likely people will feel awed in multiple ways, for example via exquisite workmanship or material use. Pan and Jiang studied “global self-continuity (GSC), a sense of connectedness among past,...
The First Language we Speak…. and Design
The first language we speak can influence how we experience spaces and the objects in them for the rest of our lives. Our earliest language influences what we pay attention to (because we need...
Setting the Barbie Scene
The sets of the Barbie movie did not fall out of the sky, they were carefully crafted by a dedicated team of professionals. Kyle Buchanan (2023, “How Those ‘Barbie’ Dreamhouses Came to Life: ‘We...
Biophilic Learning Space Design – Great for Students, Teachers, and the Planet They Live On
When biophilic design principles are applied at places where people are learning and teaching, good things happen—moods and cognitive performance improve (for students and teachers!)—which is always a plus, whether trigonometry or Latin grammar...
Quick Recap – Places to Focus
People learning need to be focusing on what they’re doing. Design supports focus when it: Uses colours that are not very saturated and are relatively light—a sage green or smokey blue with lots of...
Optimising Mental Energy Levels via Design
We do mentally easier tasks in spaces that are relatively energising places to be and those that require us to be more thoughtful, that are more challenging, in spaces where the design vibe is...
Using Spaces to Remember…
Human minds really are fascinating and the way they work means that using spaces in particular ways can help us remember things. When we’re working or just musing, we offload thoughts to the world...
More than what’s in your wine glass…
Professor Joy (I am not making this up!) and team from the University of British Columbia assessed “a number of items including the material features of the winery and the sensorial theme, such as...
Age of the Modern Farmhouse
Ronda Kaysen shares lots of details about modern farmhouse residential design, labelling it the replacement for McMansions in the psyches of many American residents. As Kaysen shares (“The Modern Farmhouse is Today’s McMansion. And...
Keeping up with the Jones – Home decor and market forces!
Grant and Handelman determined that “while consumers readily turn to the home décor marketplace for objects that help them reflect their personal identity, lifestyle media have clearly influenced an emergent cultural understanding of the...
Nature vs Malls – places and thinking
Scherz and colleagues found that people have different sorts of thoughts about other people and about places in different sorts of public spaces. The researchers determined that “Self-related thoughts were less likely in a...
Using Wood in Offices
Ojala and colleagues share that they gathered data “in two rooms: a room with wooden elements and a control room without wood. The participants first performed cognitive tasks by the computer to imitate typical...
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