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...
The unspoken signals – the Clothes and the Earrings you wear…
It seems we’ve been communicating nonverbally for a very long time. A University of Arizona press release reports that “The necklace, nametag, earrings or uniform you chose to put on this morning might say...
In conversation with The Space Doctors
Dr. Augustin and Dr. Champion had a range of experiences before they joined forces as The Space Doctors—they weren’t born yesterday even if their faces do have a certain youthful glow in every photograph...
Yes! The Places You Should Work!
On Wednesday 13th October 2021, The Space Doctors, who provide Neuroscience based prescriptions for the design of your office and home performed their poem, “Yes! The Places You Should Work!” at Workplace Trends conference at the...
Getting your Home ready for the Fall
Autumn can be the most depressing season. Sure, the leaves all turn pretty colours and the nip in the air means it’s OK to have a nip or two of hot spiced punch (with...
Let there be Light
As we move toward the solstice and beyond, if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you’ll have fewer hours of day light every day and that means less natural light in your home. This...
Fall and Food
One of the first questions that generally gets asked about design and eating is if colours on walls, plates, etc., can influence how much we eat. The answer: surface colours do indeed influence our...
Temperature Wars
This is the time of year when there are often quite lively, shall we say, debates over where to set the thermostat in your home or office. Please consider this article a public service,...
Beware of Grumpy Design!
Your mood has an effect on your impressions of the world around you, and your drive to re-design them. When we’re in a good mood, because we just got a raise or were given...
Do masks make us distance less?
Lee and Chen found that face masks may influence how far we choose to be from other people. The researchers report that via data collected through an online survey they found that “A smaller...
Blind people and colour perception
Kim and colleagues determined that “congenitally blind and sighted individuals share in-depth understanding of object colour. Blind and sighted people share similar intuitions about which objects will have consistent colours, make similar predictions for...
How to help Someone get their Appetite back?
Trying to increase the likelihood that someone will eat something? Consider Zhou, Chen, and Li’s findings: “Despite being a fundamental food feature, the effect of food shapes has been underexplored. This study demonstrates that...
Don’t be fooled into not Recycling…
Van Doorn and Kurz found that “when presented with [recycling] options people may come to psychologically frame their waste creation as a contribution to the collective good that makes them feel good about themselves....
Pink and Green and how we perceive the taste
De Sousa and colleagues report that “participants expected the coffee associated with the pink label to taste sweeter than the green labelled coffee, whereas the coffee associated with the green label was expected to...
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