What makes a happy home?
In 2019 the Happiness Research Institute released The GoodHome Report 2019: What Makes a Happy Home? and their findings echo those shared above: “after surveying over 13,000 people and interviewing nearly 80 people in 10 European...
Designing for Bonding
Design can influence the bonds we form with other people, just as it can affect how attached we feel to a space. We’ll form more positive and lasting attachments to other people in certain...
Moving beyond Bonding to Trusting
Design can make it more likely that people trust each other in few very concrete ways: Design that eradicates bad moods will lay a strong foundation on which trust in others can build. Designing...
The Most Common and Important Errors Design Professionals Seem to Make
None of us are perfect, even people who design for a living. Unfortunately, design professionals regularly do the following things, which are oh so very un-good for the people using what they’ve designed: Signalling...
Late Night Sets
Wonder how talk shows seem to have all ended up with the same sets? Read Jacqui Palumbo’s article in CNN style, “How the Late Night Talk Show Set Became an American Icon” (at https://www.cnn.com/style/article/late-night-set-design-history/index.html). ...
Flying high!
It may seem that planes, trains, automobiles, buses, and other vehicles that move you from place to place (and some that you’ve only seen on a screen somewhere, such as spacecraft), are designed entirely...
Plants, Biophilic Design and Technology…
Plants and Biophilic Design You’re very apt to see potted plants, real or artificial, in any transit hub because research has shown that when plants are present in public spaces, people are friendlier, which...
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
Automobiles Our driving performance improves when we’re smelling lemon, so next time you’re buying an in-car air freshener, go lemon. If you can tune the colour of the lights used in your car at...
Ever wanted to take the Hotel decor home with you?
Hotels are, literally, our homes away from home. We spend time in them when we’re on vacation and having a good time, but also when we’re on business trips and trying like crazy to...
Photographing everything in your home?
I love this article. Barbara Iweins has photographed each and every thing in her home and Oscar Holland of CNN discusses her images in a recent article (“A Photographer Cataloged All 12, 795 Items...
Designing for People with ADHD
If you’re trying to create a space where someone with ADHD will feel comfortable: Make sure that workspaces, and home offices, for example, are as distraction-free as possible. That means, only work-related items on...
For Room Rater fans – the back story
Are you an avid reader of the Room Rater Twitter account which scores what’s seen behind people in Zoom meetings, during video calls, etc. Emma Goldberg (“You’re Still on Mute,” 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/business/wfh-setups-rto.html) interviews one...
How to Design a Museum – The Long Read
Museums store some of our species’ greatest work, as well as impressive achievements by Mother Earth—they are places where we go to prepare to think great thoughts, and, occasionally to do a little high-powered...
Library Life
Like museums, libraries seem to be the sort of spaces where we’ll either think great thoughts or gather the ideas required to do so. You may have a library in your home or may...
Worthy Waiting Areas – the Long Read
There are times when it seems that most of our lives are being spent waiting for something (for example, an appointment) or someone. Design can make waiting much more pleasant, and lots of research...
Restaurant Design
When you’re in a restaurant, it’s likely that you have at least a passing interest in eating healthy. Design can help you do just that. If you are designing a new space for an...
How to Feel Safe/Secure at Home
We’re more apt to feel safer, that where we live is more “neighbourly,” and actually be more secure when: Cooler colours predominate in the space we’re in. We’re sitting or sleeping so that we...
When to Keep Things the Same, When to Make a Change
When you’re asking yourself if you should make a change, you’re answering your own question. When a space doesn’t seem comfortable anymore, it isn’t. A place can seem less comfortable for a variety of...
What colour to paint café walls?
Cosgun and associates report the findings of a virtual reality based research project: “This study aims to determine the effects of wall covering materials (wood, concrete and metal) used indoors on participants’ perceptual evaluations....
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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