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...
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...
Risk taking kids
Flouri and teammates report that “This study used the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study to investigate the role of greenness of the child’s immediate residential area at ages 9 months and 3, 5, 7, and 11 years...
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...
Fun, Fun, until you have to focus…
There are multiple problems with trying to ‘design in’ fun or playfulness. Different people have different ideas about what’s fun, for example. The only way to even possibly add fun to a workplace is...
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. ...
Stores
Certain conditions in stores make it more likely that we’ll make purchases and enjoy doing so. Research also indicates that most of the conditions that boost sales in physical stores also do so online,...
As the video gets worse, we start to shout…
Researchers have determined that “The more the video quality of an online meeting degrades, the louder we start talking, a new study by researchers at Radboud University and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics...
Feel less Frazzled
Even in our world’s best of times, life isn’t always the best-est and our planet’s current predicaments seem to move all of our societies’ wellbeing scores from middle of the road, neither terrible nor...
How to REALLY relax in a Space?
To really relax in a space, people need to feel in control of it, that no one can intrude visually or acoustically without their permission—in other words, no one can see or hear them...
How to Travel Stress-Free?
Many of us now are starting to travel again (hurray!) outside our own car—but travel is stressful—we’re packed into airplanes, trains, and buses as close as sardines (sometimes it seems closer) and don’t have...
Theatre for conversation
There are ways that design can make it more likely that you’ll have a constructive, mutually-beneficial conversation with someone else—whether you’re trying to negotiate world peace or help your teenager understand that they do...
Designing for All and Everyone
DeafSpace was developed at Gallaudet University years ago to spatially support people who are hard-of-hearing. As the article at the link below indicates, it is now being used to develop a major public space....
Windowless Dorms
We wrote before about the windowless dorm being built for students, and the negative impact it could have on them. Recent articles which report on the experiences of living in a windowless dormitory room...
How to build a communal space
Communal Living, Lessons Learned THE OPEN WORKSHOP developed the House of Commons exhibit “presenting over thirty-five case studies of past and present collective housing projects primarily in San Francisco and the Bay Area. In...
Evolution and Biophilic Design
Humans are a young species and still working with the same sorts of mental apparatus and ways of processing incoming information from our physical world that we had in our first few generations as...
Green Plants and Biophilic Design
Plants are important in any biophilically designed place, but biophilic designing involves much more than just distributing a few plants around. But since plants have come up, let’s start with them. Seeing green leafy...
Why we need Natural Materials
In biophilically designed spaces there are plenty of natural materials, slate and stone on floors, for example, and wood with visible grain on floors, walls, table tops, wherever it might be. Using wood with...
Colours and Biophilic Design
We have special relationships with some colours. Around the world, wherever you ask, people are more likely to tell you that the colour blue is their favourite colour than any other shade. Coincidentally, or...
Light, Sound and Movement
Flooding a space with natural light (minimizing glare with blinds as needed during certain times of the day, as needed) is biophilic design at its finest; it elevates our mood as well as our...
How to Design your Garden
There’s all sorts of science that can be applied to create a great garden—from studies of what sorts of fertilizer are best for dahlias when to how many hours of daylight petunias actually need...
The Science of Plazas, for Patios
What have neuroscientists learned about plaza design that you can apply in your patio: Design for what you actually want to happen on that patio.If you enjoy barbequing, not compromise on space for the...
Having a Positive, Productive Conversation
There are ways that design can make it more likely that you’ll have a constructive, mutually-beneficial conversation with someone else—whether you’re trying to negotiate world peace or help your teenager understand that they do...
Health and Neighbourhood Walkability
Howell and Booth tie neighborhood walkability and the presence of outdoor amenities to better health and fewer cases of diabetes among residents. They share that “researchers and policymakers alike have been searching for effective...
Choosing Others, Or Not
Uziel and Tomer Schmidt-Barad probed how having control and choosing to be alone or with others influence wellbeing. They share that “Stable social relationships are conducive to well-being. . . . The present investigation...
Conspicuous Consumption and Social Jet Lag
Yin and Huang report that “People’s schedules are jointly determined by their biological clock and social clock. However, their social clock often deviates from the biological clock (e.g., having to get up earlier than...
How to Feel Less Crowded While Waiting
Reyt and colleagues report that “Crowded waiting areas are volatile environments, where seemingly ordinary people often get frustrated and mistreat frontline staff…. we suggest an intervention that can ‘massage’ outsiders’ perceptions of crowding and...
Keep those blinds open!
Satish, Joseph, and Nanavati, recapping the benefits of natural light, report that “Exposure to daylight, in particular, plays an outsized role in our overall well-being and mental health. Like almost all animals, humans have...
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