One Mousse, Two Mousse, Yes Mousse, NO Mousse!
The Space Doctors have written another poem for you in the style of Dr Seuss! We hope you enjoy it! If you would like your very own higher resolution PDF copy to send to your...
Starting Anew – Aargh! to Aahh!
People putting together plans for new homes pass through a set of predictable phases. The first is euphoria: “Wow, I’m going to have the opportunity to do something new, to create the sort of...
TIPI – Designing for your personality
Ever wondered how you align with your friends and family? One of the things that’s clearest about space design is that everyone feels better when their personality aligns with the place that they find...
Did you know that your home design can help you eat healthily?
We are writing this as we enter a new year, but you might also be preparing to design a new home, a new space or getting ready to move completely. Well, we have some...
Creating your new home office
For some this could be the most important space in the home now we are working remotely more as a result of Covid 19 and Lockdown. We have lots of tips on how to...
Creating places to mingle in your home
Places where people will have positive, pleasant conversations: Will allow everyone who wants to make eye contact at any time they feel like it. Parties require the sorts of everyone sits in a ring...
Stress in the City
How to design a city? Mazumder reports that during his dissertation research he found that “participants were brought into an urban environment, in the real world, but also via virtual reality, through the use...
Which face mask is best?
How easy or difficult is it to understand someone wearing different sorts of face masks? Researchers lead by Brown determined via data collected from people with normal hearing that “cotton masks with filter inserts...
Carefully consider the Cart
This is an interesting one. Ever wondered why shopping trolley handles are the way they are? Ever wondered if they were designed differently how that would affect our spending habits? Well, Estes and Streicher...
Encouraging Good Behaviour
Do you have a house of unruly inhabitants? Or work with a bunch of messy sausages? Well, here at The Space Doctors are here to help! Design can encourage people to behave in ways...
Textures Matter, Even for Robots
Umeda lead a research team that found that “Body texture, such as softness or elasticity, is an important consideration in the design of robots meant for interactive functions. . . . researchers asked adult participants...
Banking Happiness
Faraji-Rad and Lee determined that “Merely anticipating a future sad event motivates consumers to ‘accumulate happiness’ in order to enhance their ability to cope with the anticipated sadness later—a phenomenon that we call banking...
Living with Stress
Goldring and Bolger investigated how daily stressors influence lives and found that “Prior research shows that daily stressors lead to greater psychological distress. A separate body of research links daily stressors to physical symptoms...
The Space in the Place!
As a gift for Christmas, The Space Doctors have written another poem for you in the style of Dr Seuss! We hope you enjoy it! If you would like your very own higher resolution PDF...
How to make Food taste nicer! The Definitive Guide!
So, you’ve got people coming over and you’d like them to leave with memories of eating all sorts of yummy (and if you’re really hardcore, nutritious) food at your party—and you definitely don’t want...
Time for the Familiar!
During the holidays, and actually throughout the year, familiar really can be best—we do like spaces to change or evolve slightly over time and even to vary slightly by time of day or season...
Scent and Heat!
At this time of year we can become particularly attuned to the smells in our homes and offices, regularly because they’re not very good. If you actively manage the scents in your home and...
Refreshment time!
During the holidays, we often need to not only work at whatever our job is but also spend time catching up with family, friends, and colleagues, all of this can lead us desperate to...
Are you arguing with your designer?
If you are, don’t be surprised—the two of you bring very different mindsets to any design discussion. Designers have spent a lot of time thinking about design (no surprise there). Even if you’ve been...
Open the windows!
Want to perform better? Joseph Allen, Director, Harvard’s Healthy Buildings program, details in a recent article in The Atlantic (free at the web address below) why ventilation, particularly in workplaces, is important: “My team...
Keep warm and feel safe
The warmer we are the safer we feel. Hornstein, Fanselow, and Eisenberger link feeling something warm feeling safe: “a physically warm stimulus was less readily associated with threat (compared to soft or neutral stimuli;...
Healthy shapes
We had a reader’s question on this too in November 2021. Trying to get someone to eat healthy? Wang, Zhang, and Jiang determined via multiple experiments that “angular shapes are associated with healthy food,...
Greenspace is better for childhood development
New research from Jarvis and colleagues has been published. They looked at how living near greenspace impacted childhood development. It turns out, that it does 🙂 How did they do it? They report that...
Language Issues
When we speak a language we need to choose words from those available—sure every so often in a Dr. Seuss inspired moment of creativity, for example, we can invent a word or a phrase,...
Designing for differences
We all come in slightly different packages. And our world needs to be designed to support the inevitability of those differences. Some differences between people are more obvious and others subtler. It’s clear when...
Designing for Who You Are and Who They Probably Are too!
One of the things that’s clearest about space design is that everyone feels better when their personality aligns with the place that they find themselves. But who are you? Who are the people who...
Fish Tank Heaven
We have mentioned the restorative, de-stressing, etc., power of fish tanks lots in earlier issues, but now, it seems, they’re officially “in” (see reference to the NY Times article below). Fish tanks are finally...
Greens are in for 2022!
Greens are in and I love greens, wherever they are, for reasons I talk about all the time. Ones that are not very saturated but relatively light lead to just the right moods for...
Pile on the Biophilic Experiences
Aristizabal and colleagues have found that more simultaneous biophilic experiences are better than fewer: when people in their study “were exposed to three biophilic design interventions (visual, auditory, and a combination (multisensory)) and a...
Naming something? Add Nature!
If you want to give the impression that something is of value, then add some “nature” to it. Hahnel-Peeters and colleagues report that “In Study 1, we conducted a content analysis of the naming...
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