design science

Cultures differ in how they perceive time, and these differences should be reflected in the way options are presented to clients.  Researchers found that “Consumers respond more favorably to advertising when the placement of product images is consistent with the way they visualize time . . . . Consumers who live in cultures that read from left to right think about time in terms of a horizontal timeline, with the past on the left and the future on the right . . . .

It’s not news to report that people feel that the products they own signal who they are as a person.  New research indicates that we have a complex relationship with product options that are presented to us, but which we do not yet own: “Encouraging consumers to feel ownership of products they haven't yet purchased can backfire because consumers tend to see themselves in the products they own . . . In a series of studies, consumers perceived products they did not own as different from themselves because they projected their ‘anti-self’ onto them.

Humans may not be captivated by pictures of brains after all and it may not be as productive for practitioners to use neuroscience-related images in conversations with clients as previous research indicated.  Michael and his colleagues report that “we . . . were intrigued by the finding that a brain image makes accompanying information more credible . . . we . . . ran a series of systematic replications of the original study—comprising 10 experiments and nearly 2,000 subjects.

In a 2012 presentation at Light Canada/IIDEX 2012, Jennifer Veitch of the National Research Council Canada effectively summarized the findings of office lighting research carried out by her, her colleagues, and other researchers.  As Veitch reports, “Laboratory research at NRC and elsewhere demonstrated that people prefer a mixture of direct and indirect lighting that lights the entire workspace and individual personal control over the local lighting level.

Research consistently links cleanliness, or sensory experiences associated with cleanliness, such as the scents of cleaning products, to moral behavior (see for example, https://researchdesignconnections.com/pub/clean-smells-and-moral-behavior-10-29-09).  In a recent project, Yang and colleagues learned “In a field experiment at a farmers' market, vendors who handled dirty money subsequently cheated customers, whereas those who handled clean money gave fair value . . .

Designers developing travel destinations need to know what draws tourists to an area.  Lacher and team found through a study that “force[d] individuals to make choices between hypothetical trips based on tradeoffs of attributes such as number of activities, amount of locally owned restaurants, degree of local character, and trip cost . . . .

New research suggests that people developing spaces that will be used by autistic people, for example, as classrooms, should insure that those areas are pet friendly.  This might mean that there are places nearby for animals to stretch their legs or that the design supports small animals and their cages, perhaps through in-room water faucets.

Recent research confirms that men have a “slight, but significant, superiority in spatial navigation over females.”  Reviewing studies of the spatial ability of members of 11 different species, including humans, scientists “found that in eight out of 11 species, males demonstrated moderately superior spatial skills to their female counterparts, regardless of the size of their territories or the extent to which males ranged farther than females of the same species . . . 
The findings lend support to an often-overlooked hypothesis . . . .

Additional research confirms that there are health problems with prolonged sitting and further encourages non-seated work, relaxation, etc. options (for further information, see https://researchdesignconnections.com/pub/sitting-and-walkability-05-01-12).  After reviewing the health of thousands of men from 45 to 64 years old, researchers report that “Compared to those sitting <4 hours/day, participants reporting 4 to <6, 6 to <8, and ≥8 hours were significantly more likely to report ever having any chronic disease . . .

More than one factor influences home-selection decisions.  Zahabi and his teammates learned from a study focused on “the relationships between Land-use (LU), public transit accessibility (PT), parking policies, and mode choice for suburban Montreal” that decisions about where to live are made simultaneously with decisions about how to travel to and from work – the two are fully interrelated.  That means that home-selection decisions are tightly related to how residents prefer to travel to and from work.