Barbie’s Dream House
Are you one of the millions of kids who played happily with a Barbie Dream House? If you are, you’ll relish reading Julie Lasky’s “A Six-Decade Tour of Barbie’s Dreamhouses” (2022, The New York...
Shiny or Matte?
Huang, Song, and Yang report that “glossy (vs. matte) finishes increase consumers’ perceived effectiveness of a problem-avoiding product while the reverse is true for a problem-approaching product. . . . we demonstrate that glossy [matte] finishes lead consumers...
Do you go to Antique shops?
You’ll be interested in Ross, Bolton, and Meloy’s work. They found that “The market for secondhand items – goods previously owned by others- is rapidly growing. Disordered environments, characterized by disorganized or messy product...
Learning in a Space
A UCLA press release shares that “Wearing VR headsets, participants explored one of two environments — a fantasy fairyland or a science fiction landscape — where they could click to learn the Swahili or...
Get Your Kids to Wild Nature
Weiss, Kahn, and Lam found that “Interaction with nature is vital for children’s physical and psychological development. . . . [we] tested our hypothesis that relatively wild areas of this environment would be positively...
Japendi is In!
Minimalistic Japanese design is having a moment, particularly when combined with Scandinavian design—which is not surprising. Lots of us seem to feel pretty stressed out and nothing makes us feel tense as fast as...
It’s Color of the Year Time, Again
Pantone has decided that the color of 2023 is—drumroll please—Viva Magenta. To get an idea what Viva Magenta actually looks like, click on either of the links below. The CNN article quotes Pantone as...
Art Matters
Something we talk about a lot at The Space Doctors is how art influences our wellbeing, how we think and behave. Alex Marshall, in the article at the link below (“Bringing World-Class Art, and...
Podcasting Acoustics
A press release from the Acoustical Society of America shares that “A high-quality podcast recording is one that does not capture sounds other than the podcaster’s voice. . . . Mechanical noise should be controlled...
Light at Night and Diabetes
Yu and colleagues determined that LAN (light at night) “is associated with impaired blood glucose control and an increased risk of diabetes. . . . The intensity of urban light pollution has increased to...
Go for a Winter Walk!
Researchers determined that “spending time in snowy surroundings can improve how you feel about your body. . . . Before and after walking in a snowy woodland in the Silesia region of Poland [people...
Sound, Complaints, Repercussions
Mueller-Trapet shares that “Whether it’s the constant stomping of feet or the thump from dropping something . . . ‘impact sounds,’ are one of the main causes for complaints in multi-unit residential buildings and...
Greenspace Metrics, Outcomes
Nieuwenhuijsen and team share that “Recently a new 3-30-300 rule of thumb for urban forestry and urban greening has been proposed. . . . The rule requires that every citizen should be able to...
Art and Culture
Ho and colleagues report that their “research investigates the appreciation of visual arts cross-culturally by hypothesizing and testing a cultural-match effect (i.e., people tend to appreciate same-culture artworks more than they appreciate different-culture artworks)....
Co-Working May Not Support Business Creativity Long Term
Haefliger and Yacoub determined that “Co-working spaces can limit the creativity and innovation of new businesses. . . . These shared spaces . . . may offer initial opportunities to collaborate but, before long,...
Pushes Toward the Familiar
Winet and O’Brien report that “In eight experiments with nearly 6,000 total participants, [they] explored whether people tend to prefer novel, exciting experiences, such as trying a new restaurant, or familiar ones, such as...
Thinking While Wearing a Mask
Smerdon found that “mandatory mask wearing has a negative causal effect on the cognitive performance of competitive chess players. I analyzed the quality of almost 3 million chess moves played by 8,531 individuals (ages...
Why do we love the sea, lakes and rivers?
In “The Surprising Benefits of Blue Spaces” Frankie Adkins and Katherine Latham (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221108-the-doctors-prescribing-blue-therapy) talk about the benefits of time on the ocean and in blue spaces: “When Homo sapiens first evolved some 300,00 years...
The Science of Opera
Interested in opera and in neuroscience? You’ll be fascinated by this article merging the two: Frank Rose’s “Music, Science and Healing Intersect in an A.I. Opera” (The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/arts/music/artificial-intelligence-opera.html). A taste: “’We’ve...
Why we go back to places
Winet and O’Brien report that “In eight experiments with nearly 6,000 total participants, [they]explored whether people tend to prefer novel, exciting experiences, such as trying a new restaurant, or familiar ones, such as returning...
When and how to face the camera
Research by Fauville and colleagues in the virtual world is probably relevant in real life also: “the impact of three nonverbal cues displayed through video conference screenshots (i.e., gaze direction, distance between the face...
Thinking while Standing
Bhat and associates report that “The present study investigated the effects of attending lectures in sitting and standing postures on executive function of young adults. . . . Attending a lecture in a standing...
Seeing, Hearing birds
Hammond and team studied implications of seeing or hearing birds. They “used the Urban Mind smartphone application to examine the impact of seeing or hearing birds on self-reported mental wellbeing in real-life contexts. A sample...
Spiciness and Expectations
Wang, Yang, and Zheng studied how the the way hot sauces look how spicy we perceive them to be, determining that “red hot sauce still generates the strongest expected spiciness. Higher saturation of hot...
Managing Office Temperatures
Research at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment (CBE) “found no evidence for a relationship between temperature and work performance within the range temperatures commonly found in office buildings, and certainly...
Positive Effects of At-Work Nature
Loder and Stoner reviewed studies related to nature (for example, plants, nature views) in workplaces. They report, for example, that “Research has shown that contact with nature can improve task performance, usually through increased...
Nature Urban Strolls
Sudimac, Sale, and Kuhn share that they “conducted an intervention study to investigate changes in stress-related brain regions as an effect of a one-hour walk in an urban (busy street) vs. natural environment (forest)....
How much are views worth?
Crompton and Nicholls report that “Twenty-seven empirical studies were identified that empirically estimated the impact on property values of views of open space. The review differentiated between street level and high-rise building views. Among...
Pregnant People in Green Spaces
Sun and colleagues had “pregnant women between 8 and 14 weeks’ gestational age . . . view one of three, 5-min, VR [virtual reality] videos of an urban scene with different green space levels...
Designing for Sleeping zzzzzz
Several issues ago we wrote about how design can make it easier for people to fall asleep and stay asleep (here), and designing for sleeping has been in the news recently. Would you go...
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