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,...
Miniature Houses – Telling Key Stories…
Miniatures, the sorts of items that would be at home in the most intricate doll houses, are finding their ways into many retailers in North America—which is intriguing—are these tiny things helping us wax...
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...
Is Gardening good for Mental Health?
Rosa and teammates reviewed published studies and found that “some horticultural interventions plus usual care (i.e., continuing normal routine for healthy people or treatment for unhealthy ones) may reduce depressive symptoms more than usual...
Scent and Smells to help improve the Brain – Enriching lives with Scents
Woo and colleagues report that “Male and female older adults . . . age 60–85, were enrolled in the study and randomly assigned to an Olfactory Enriched or Control group. Individuals in the enriched...
Beaches are best!
Hooyberg and colleagues, using virtual reality, determined that “beaches caused lower breathing rates than urban environments and lower SCR [skin conductance responses] than green environments. . . . the heart rate, HF-HRV [high-frequency heart...
Human Art beats Robot Art
Di Dio and associates report that participants in their study “were asked to give beauty (BJ) and liking (LJ) judgments. . . . Aesthetic judgments were made in a blind-baseline condition, devoid of authorship...
Trees are good for Mental Health and Performance – the 3-30-300 Rule
Konijnendijk reports that “Having trees and other vegetation in sight from one’s home, place of work, or school has important mental health and performance benefits. . . . With public green spaces in proximity...
Nature and Patience
Xu and Ding report that “exposure to nature will lead consumers to be more patient in their waiting decisions. . . . marketers can reduce customer churn during peak or out-of-stock periods by decorating...
Biophilia in Space
Winn and colleagues report that “Natural materials, biomorphic forms, and the incorporation of plants and green elements are all strategies to implement biophilic design. Biophilic design can improve the cognitive and physiological health of...
Working from home and Cars…
Sepanta, O’Brien, and Arpan collected data from people “who started teleworking and moved at least 20 kilometres away from their original homes within two years of the beginning of COVID-19. . . . The...
Trees vs Social Media and Impact on Stress
Bailey, Anderson, and Cox “explore[d] the mechanisms of active and passive leisure influence through real-time tracking of mental states while incurring a standard ‘dose’ of social media and walking. Results indicate that social media...
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,...
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...
The “Best” Gardens
Margaret Roach (2023, “More Plants, More Life, More Pleasure: What Sets the Best Gardens Apart,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/realestate/gardening-landscaping-ecological.html ) has spent a lot of quality time figuring out what sets the best...
Nature makes us more sociable!
Arbuthnott learned via a literature review that “Nature exposure increases prosocial behavior, decreases antisocial behavior, and increases ratings of social connection and satisfaction. Prosocial and antisocial behavior effects are observed with brief nature exposure,...
Why is gardening good for you?
Lehberger and Sparke’s work confirms that gardening is good for our mental health. They “replicated a study conducted in 2020 in Germany, which focused on comparing garden owners and non-garden owners. Almost exactly one...
Get out there and go for an Open Water Swim!
Overbury, Conroy, and Marks determined that “Open water swimming may lead to improvements in mood and wellbeing, reductions in mental distress symptomatology, and was experienced as a positive, enriching process for many. Blue spaces...
Is Traffic Noise knocking out your Smartness?
Researchers have determined that “as little as 40 decibels of traffic noise – the typical level of background noise in an office environment or kitchen – has a detrimental effect on cognitive performance. Researchers...
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...
Nature and Mood
Bardhan and teammates report that they “conducted one of the first longer-term investigations of daily nature exposure and mood with a mobile app as part of the NatureDose™ Student Study (NDSS). The NatureDose™ app...
ASMR and Biophilia
Mahady, Takac, and De Foe report that “Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a nascent phenomenon wherein a pleasant and relaxing tingling sensation occurs in response to audio and visual triggers like whispering and...
Too much tech in hotel rooms, bring on the Biophilia!
There is a natural limit to everything, including the amount of automation in our lives, and as Amy Tara Koch reports in “Encountering the Infuriating, Overwhelming and Unwanted Smart Tech in My Hotel Room”...
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...
Barbie Pink!
With the global PR tsunami pushing people into theatres to see the new Barbie movie, it seems that the colour pink is everywhere. Looking at relatively unsaturated, light shades of pink is definitely relaxing...
Biophilic Offices – more research encouraging us to use Biophilia in the workplace
Yin’s dissertation research determined that “participants experiencing biophilic environment virtually had similar physiological and cognitive responses, including reduced blood pressure and skin conductance and improved short-term memory, as when experiencing the actual environment. . ....
We hear silence…
Silence is not simply the absence of sound; we actively hear it. Goh, Phillips, and Firestone found that “silences can ‘substitute’ for sounds in event-based auditory illusions. Seven experiments introduce three ‘silence illusions,’ adapted...
Yummy scents and then bang goes the diet! The lasting smell of temptation!
Chae, Yoon, Baskin and Zhu link smells and food consumed, studying “the effects of indulgent food scents [the smell of chocolate chip cookies baking, for example] on preference for indulgent food items. . . ....
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...
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