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Research on Falls in Hospitals (12-05-12)
December 2012

The Center for Health Design has related a new report on factors that contribute to patient falls in hospitals (“Contribution of the Designed Environment to Fall Risk in Hospitals”).  The report, written by Margaret Calkins, Stacey Biddle, and Orion Biesan is available without charge at the web address noted below.  Conclusions are derived from “Crosssectional analysis of 27 units in 12 hospitals using archival fall data” and “identified a number of design characteristics that were associated with greater or fewer falls, including visibility to staff work spaces, presence of a dedicated family space in the room, bathroom layout and supportive features, and more.”  The conclusions drawn are important because “there has been very little research that systematically examines the role of characteristics of the built environment such as room and unit layout, relationship of the bed to the bathroom, or layout and features of the bathroom on falls.”

http://www.healthdesign.org/chd/research/references/contribution-designed-environment-fall-risk-hospitals

 
Sensing Design (12-04-12)
December 2012

Rosenblum and Gordon review exotic perceptual skills such as “our ability to echolocate like bats; to scent-track like dogs; and to improve our brain’s touch skills to compensate for temporary visual deprivation.”  Their concluding comments indicate how rich and integrated our various sensory modalities are:  “The human perceptual world is rich with information and the perceptual abilities to explore that information.  Humans are visually dominant creatures; vision is principal in our phenomenology and the appropriation of the neural cortex associated with vision is greater than for any other function – other sensory modalities notwithstanding.  Nonetheless, our perceptual interactions with the world are populated with whatever variety of signals we can detect.   Echolocation as a supplement or primary source supports spatial navigation, as does olfaction, if we seek to encounter the world in that manner . . . .  it seems that . . . we are able to organize the sensory signals in our brain by some common functions . . . . whatever the stimulating source of our senses (e.g., lights, sounds), it is possible that once that energy is transduced by the receptors it becomes party of a common biochemical communication system.  Our introspective experience may be of sound, smell or touch, but our perceptual interactions, and the brain’s organizational principle, is of spaces, objects and events.”  Multi-sensory design is thus inherently holistic design.

Lawrence Rosenblum and Michael Gordon.  2012.  “The Exotic Sensory Capabilities of Humans.”  The Psychologist, vol. 25, no. 12, pp. 904-907.

Nostalgia and Temperature (12-03-12)
December 2012

Feeling nostalgic can influence how warm a person thinks a room is and people in cooler places can be more nostalgic.  Researchers have found that when study participants were asked to sit “in one of three rooms: cold (20˚C), comfortable (24˚C) and hot (28˚C) . . . Participants felt more nostalgic in the cold room than in the comfortable and hot rooms. The volunteers in the comfortable and hot rooms did not differ.” During a subsequent study with people who listened to music “the participants who said the music made them feel nostalgic also tended to say that the music made them feel physically warmer.”  When participants sitting in a cold room were asked to “recall either a nostalgic or ordinary event from their past . . . [and] then asked to guess the temperature of the room . . .  those who recalled a nostalgic event perceived the room they were in to be warmer.” This research may help designers and others understand perceptions of thermal comfort that may have previously been difficult to interpret.

“Heart-Warming Memories:  Nostalgia Can Make You Feel Warmer.”  2012.  Press release, University of Southampton, http://www.southampton.ac.uk