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...
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...
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...
Neighbourhood Perceptions, Evaluations and Wellbeing
Ayalon determined that “the importance of subjective mediators, rather than objective ones in explaining the association between perceived neighborhood characteristics and wellbeing.” Wellbeing was higher when perceived neighborhood disorder was lower and neighborhood cohesion...
Don’t always Follow Trends…
A lot of people make a lot of money creating and publicising trends, in design and elsewhere. They’d like you to think that your only option as a rational human being is to follow...
Sounds Good!
When our ears are happy, the odds get pretty good that the rest of us is as well. What can you do to create an acoustic haven? Keep echoes down.Echoing stresses us out. Use...
Speaking and Designing
It may not seem that the language we’re speaking should have much effect on our responses to designed spaces but indeed it does. We pick up on social cues such as the language being...
Garden!
Fjaestad and team’s work confirms the value of gardening; they learned via data gathered from people 46 to 80 years old that “Compared to participants who did not engage in gardening, those who gardened...
Why Objects Matter
Sharfenberger and associates determined that “being physically close to objects helps consumers to feel psychologically close to the more abstract meaning of these objects. Four experimental studies . . . indicate that being proximal...
Closer Greenspace Less Likelihood of Postpartum Depression
Sun and colleagues found that “A reduced risk for PPD [postpartum depression was associated with total green space exposure based on street-view measure [500 m buffer. . .], but not NDVI [normalized difference vegetation...
Living Your Best Life in a Small Space – Intro
Living small is living thoughtfully. You may be living small for all sorts of reasons, but it’s unlikely that you’re doing so by mistake. To actually live and work in a small space, and...
Living Green in a Small Space
Why you or someone you care about has decided to live in a tiny home influences what you can do to make living in one a pleasant experience. Some of the reasons that people...
We like what we know
Darda and colleagues share that they “we explored Northern American and Indian participants’ aesthetic judgments and preferences for abstract and representational artworks. . . . no evidence was found for an ingroup bias ....
Do our preferences change?
Aleem and Grzywacz looked at our responses to aesthetics over time and report that “A handful of studies that have measured aesthetic preferences at multiple moments show that preferences may change in as little...
Biophilically Designed Gardens
The gardens that have the most positive effects on our minds and our bodies actively apply important principles of biophilic design. We have discussed biophilic design in detail in here (and search in our...
What to hear in your Garden?
Listening to just the right sorts of nature sounds can be as cognitively refreshing and good at reducing our stress levels as seeing nature, in real life or in photos or videos, all of...
Smelling the right Smells outdoors
Gardens can be planned so that the scents that they generate serve well those that smell them. From a psychological perspective the best scents for your garden to produce (also, the best garden-based scents...
Building in Good Neighbours!
We can build and use our homes in ways that increase our positive bonds with the people who live nearby. Sit on your front porch or steps if you have them from time to...
How to design so people… behave…!
Want people to do something particular in a space? Sit quietly and read? Enjoy a movie with others without interjecting comments for all to hear? Eat using the table manners their grandmother would be...
Building connections to Artwork
Carbon reports that “When we attend sculptures in museums, they might fascinate us due to the mastery of the material, the inherent dynamics of body language or due to contrapposto or the sheer size...
Health Implications: Light at Night
New research confirms that experiencing higher levels of light at night may not be healthy for people, particularly pregnant ones. A study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology Maternal Fetal Medicinereports...
Locate Schools Near Greenspaces for Best Effects
Rahal, Wells, and Evan “examined the [relationship between] school greenspace . . . and a standard literacy enrichment program . . . over a one-year period for a large sample of ethnic minority (95%)...
Benefits of Being in a City
Movies and television shows and books and magazine articles (every sort of media, it seems) makes city living seem oh so exciting and in many ways quite irresistible. Country living is presented as fine,...
How to Live in a City
Once you get yourself to the city, renting or buying a place, you have to spend time living there. But humans developed into their current forms living in nature. Over the aeons our brains...
Your Personality and Your In-City Home
Although there’s always the chance (day or night) to pop out of an urban residence, it’s even more important that that a home in the city aligns with your personality than that one outside...
Take “Advice” With More Than One Grain of Salt
When you are selecting a home, in the city or elsewhere, it’s important to make up your own mind about the options available to you and not be cajoled into living here or there...
Cities and Pets
Pets living in cities lead very different lives than their country cousins. In this era, city dogs are likely to have some access to nearby green areas, but that’s not necessarily the case. City...
Separate Bedrooms it is!
February 10, not coincidently, probably, just before Valentine’s Day, Ronda Kaysen writes, in The New York Times, about people who live together, who love each other, who choose to sleep in separate bedrooms (“I...
Design affects kids too…
On January 31, in an article for The New York Times, Tim McKeough writes about designing spaces for children, that are, miraculously, developed keeping kids’ needs in mind (“How to Create a Playroom that...
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