Packing and Un-packing…
When you are getting ready to move, what should you pack first, unpack first, not pack at all? When you are getting ready to move the thought of getting everything you own into boxes...
Your Home’s “Face”
The façade of your home is the face that it presents to the world. Just like our own faces have a big effect on the instantaneous opinions formed of us as people, the front...
Tension and Tastes
Zushi’s team shares that “Prior research indicate that emotional states can alter taste perception, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. . . . The first experiment investigated how anxiety affects taste perception when individuals...
Synaesthesia!
If you’re interested in synaesthesia, take a look at Cytowic’s work, available at the link, below. Cytowic shares that “Synaesthesia has already caused a paradigm shift in two senses. For science, it has forced...
Lighting and Feeling Tired
Zhou and Pan report that “participants were tested under different illuminance levels and correlated color temperatures (CCT) for three distinct reading durations. Reading efficiency during the task tests and objective measures of brain activity...
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,...
There are more benefits of being active – beyond the Calories!
The research is very clear that being active, really using your muscles throughout the day, has all sorts of benefits beyond burning calories (although burning calories is indeed a good thing). Taking a walk,...
Cold Weather Fixes…
Want to feel warmer? Make sure you’re surrounded by warm colours and nix the cooler ones. The difference in perceived temperatures can be as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Similarly, when we see images...
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...
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...
Scenting and Branding…. yes this is a thing!
M. Brown, in a recent article in The New York Times reviews recent efforts by many to link their locations/products/services to specific scents in consumers’ minds (“When You Think About Your Credit Card, Does...
Nature and the Authentic you!
Yang, Sedikides, Wang, and Cai “formulated several hypotheses: (a) nature fosters authenticity, and it does so through at least four plausible mechanisms: self-esteem, basic needs satisfaction (autonomy, competence, relatedness), mindfulness, and positive affect; (b)...
How Women write about Nature
Researchers have learned more about how who we are influences how we write about nature; the same demographic factors likely influence thinking more generally. A Langer lead team found that “female authors tend to...
Does the first letter of your name affect your life decisions?
Chatterjee, Mishra, and Mishra share that “Nominative determinism manifests as a preference for a profession or city to live in that begins with the same letter as a person’s own name. . . ....
Loneliness and time alone
Danvers and colleagues learned that “spending more than 75% of time alone was associated with much higher loneliness scores. . . . people who spend very much or very little of their time surrounded by others tend...
Perception and visual clues – food
Lopez, Choi, Dellawar, Cullen, Contreras, Rosenfeld, and Tomiyama’s report that “Satiation can play a role in regulating eating behavior, but research suggests visual cues may be just as important. In a seminal study by...
Boring meetings and passive fatigue!
Nurmi and Pakarinen’s work “challenge[s] the commonly held belief that virtual meeting fatigue manifests as exhaustion (i.e., active fatigue) resulting from overloading demands and instead suggest that participation in virtual meetings may lead to...
How smell affects the colours we “think” we see….
Ward and teammates found that “Odors for instance are often perceived with visual cues; these sensations interact to form our own subjective experience. This integration process can have a profound impact on the resulting...
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...
Sharing spaces – Extraverts and Introverts
Mingling means sharing spaces, etc., and the personalities of the people doing that sharing and the design of the space being shared can have a major effect on how well it all goes. People...
Space Sharing – Gender difference?
Men and women can experience spaces in different ways for physiological reasons that seem quite distinct from their sexual preferences. Because female fingers tend to be smaller than male ones (women are often shorter...
Space Sharing…Designers do it Differently!
Invited to a party at the home of someone with design training and feeling all is not quite right? Designing training causes us to find different aspects of interiors familiar—and we like what’s familiar....
Scents to make us feel good!
When we’re mingling we’re often cooking and eating. How do the food smells we’re likely to encounter influence our time with others? Scents that make us feel nostalgic improve our mood, whether those scents...
Nostalgia is good for your soul as well asyour mental performance
A place where you feel nostalgic can be good for your mental performance as well as your soul. Sensory design can make nostalgic experiences more or less likely. Scents can lead to nostalgic thinking...
We take more Chances when we’re warm it seems…
Lundberg, Craig, and Peloza share that “Across four studies, we find evidence for a positive relationship between temperature and risk-taking, using multiple operationalizations of temperature and measurements of risk. . . . In particular,...
Art and Culture Differences
Trawinski and colleagues had British and Chinese people look at Western representational paintings and report that “Eye movements were recorded while participants viewed the paintings with each painting split into face, theme of the...
Designing for Gender doesn’t always work…
Dai and colleagues found that “It is common that marketers design and position pretty products more to female consumers than to male consumers, suggesting they generally believe that females have a stronger preference than...
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