How to shape your products
Of course it depends on what product you are selling, but this is interesting research. Shi, Mai, and Mo report that “this research explores how anthropomorphic products’ humanlike body shapes influence consumer evaluation and...
What to Take on a Trip Anywhere
It’s nice to feel at home even when you aren’t-but unless your luggage is much, much larger than the suitcase I travel with, you can’t take much of your home with you when you...
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...
Library Life
Like museums, libraries seem to be the sort of spaces where we’ll either think great thoughts or gather the ideas required to do so. You may have a library in your home or may...
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...
When to Keep Things the Same, When to Make a Change
When you’re asking yourself if you should make a change, you’re answering your own question. When a space doesn’t seem comfortable anymore, it isn’t. A place can seem less comfortable for a variety of...
Thinking while Grooving
Fukuie and colleagues report that “Hearing a groove rhythm (GR), which creates the sensation of wanting to move to the music, can also create feelings of pleasure and arousal in people, and it may...
Safer Streets
Pappas reviewed many published studies and determined that “Visually cluttered roads, confusing signage, and broad thoroughfares that practically beg drivers to stomp on the accelerator can encourage behaviors that raise risk. . . ....
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...
Hearing and Thinking
Radun and colleagues investigated the effects of particular sorts of sound on cognitive performance and report that “Exposure to impulsive sound (65 dB LAeq) was compared with quiet sound (35 dB LAeq) and steady-state sound (65 dB...
Get your children playing outside!
A research team at University of Exeter has identified some cognitive benefits of playing outdoors. They report, in a study published in Child Psychiatry and Human Development, that “children who spend more time playing...
Keep lights low at night…
The Mason team reports that their “laboratory study shows that, in healthy adults, one night of moderate (100 lx) light exposure during sleep increases nighttime heart rate, decreases heart rate variability (higher sympathovagal balance),...
Infant cries and minor keys
Zeloni and Pavani share that “In Western music and in music of other cultures, minor chords, modes and intervals evoke sadness. . . . we asked expert musicians to transcribe into music scores spontaneous...
The bolder the colour, the more we pay?
Garay, Perez, and Pulga probed responses to colour palettes used in paintings and report that “Most existing literature has ignored the potential effects that color intensity may have on art prices. . . ....
The larger the better?
Huang, Wang, and Chan studied links between image sizes on packages and evaluations of the contents of those packages; their findings can probably be applicable more broadly: “larger (vs. smaller) food images on food...
How do we decide?
If you are a company owner, how should your customer service look? Beeler and colleagues focus on judgments of digital assistant technologies, but what they learned can likely be extrapolated to other contexts: “ability...
Coordinating Our Thinking About Sensory Experiences
Scheller and Sui report that “When interacting with the environment, humans exhibit robust biases toward information that pertains to themselves: Self-relevant information is processed faster and yields more accurate responses than information linked to...
Living Near Green Space and Brain Performance
Jimenez and colleagues link exposure to green space and higher levels of cognitive functioning. They share that that by studying data from 13,594 women (mean age 61), they determined that “increasing green space was...
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...
Eyes and Ears at Work
In multiple articles we’ve talked about sensory experiences that are relaxing (looking at colours that are not very saturated but relatively light like a sage green with lots of white mixed into it, for...
Biophilic Design in Workplaces
All those plants you see around your workplace are not there by chance. Research consistently shows that being able to see a couple of plants (not more) as you work boost your cognitive performance,...
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. ...
Hearing the right “silent” messages
Space designers and managers are also really focused on you getting the right messages from what they provide. Some research studies have found that the nonverbal messages that you pull from your workplace have...
Healing Spaces
Healing spaces have probably been researched more extensively than any other sort of place (largely because it’s so easy to quantify the results of design actions taken there; after something changes more or less...
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,...
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 use Scent?
Now that you’ve considered what you’re hearing, it’s time to think about what you’re smelling as you try to decompress: Smelling lavender helps you relax (it also encourages you to be more trusting of...
What we See and Touch
It probably won’t surprise you at all to know that touching soft things, such like the flannels that baby pyjamas are made of, is relaxing. If you want to banish the stress demons, make...
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