Latest Blog Posts

In an open access article, Liedgren, Desmet, and Gaggiolo lay out the case for considering higher levels in Maslow’s system when developing design options.  They “argue that the sublime is struggling to find room in product design primarily aimed at commercial and transactional goals such as speed and efficiency. We suggest a new category of products to promote deeper and more meaningful experiences, specifically those offering liminality, transcendence, and personal transformation. . . . Traditional structured approaches to experience (UX) design reduce the complexity of human experience by narrowing it down to transactions: qualities that can be managed in scalable, and predictable design processes, such as aesthetic pleasure, marketability, ease of use, or momentary desirability. Liminal Design chooses another approach: in a structured way, it explores the phenomenology of experiential design while embracing the impalpable, incorporeal, and transformative nature of deep real-life human experiences. There is a need for these kinds of approaches to support the practice of design for experiences that extend beyond those dictated by efficiency and simple pleasure.” Concrete examples of how design can support transcendence are included.

Johan Liedgren, Pieter Desmet, and Andrea Gaggiolo. 2023. “Liminal Design:  A Conceptual Framework and Three-Step Approach for Developing Technology That Delivers Transcendence and Deeper Experiences.”  Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, 10431, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023/104317o

Liu and team’s research indicates that age does not seem to affect mental refreshment via virtual reality experiences.  The investigators found using a literature review that “natural landscapes displayed through virtual reality positively influence the emotions of older adults[ over 60 years old].  Simple scenes such as waterscapes and plants were more applicable virtual interventions for older adults compared with complex scenes.”

Pai Liu, Jingdong Liu, Jessica Fernandez, Qingjun Zou, and Mofei Lin.  “Positive Affect and Natural Landscape in Virtual Reality:  A Systematic Review Comparing Interventions, Measures, and Outcomes.”  Journal of Environmental Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102011

Wang and Leung studied the indoor visual environments (IVE) in residential care homes (RDCHs).  They learned that “The IVE, including opening design, interior design, and lighting conditions components, should be designed to satisfy older people's special visual needs. Hence, this study aims to investigate the effects of older people's subjective perceptions of the IVE on their visual-related physical health. In total, 197 questionnaires were collected from older persons living in RCHs. . . . the view out, window, corridors, furniture locations, curtains or louvers, handrails, and light level significantly affected the visual-related physical health of older people. Practical recommendations were proposed, including beds and seats near the windows with beautiful scenery, corridors with night lights and unblocked vision, automatic curtains with light sensors, handrails with a high color contrast with the background walls, minimum 200lx ambient lighting, etc.”

Chendi Wang and Mei-Yung Leung.  “Effects of Subjective Perceptions of Indoor Visual Environment on Visual-Related Physical Health of Older People in Residential Care Homes.”  Building and Environment, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2023.110301

Von der Au and colleagues increase our understanding of augmented reality (AR) experiences.  They share that “Augmented reality (AR) integrates virtual content into a consumer's perception of the real world. . . . context (e.g., experiencing a virtual sofa at home vs. in a university classroom) impacts consumer judgments and evaluations. The results reveal two primary effects of context. First, contexts in which virtual objects meet users' personal and cultural expectations associated with a specific location (e.g., a sofa in a living room) increase plausibility. However, such functionally appropriate contexts (counterintuitively) decrease local presence (i.e., the perception that the virtual product is “here”). Study 2 extends this model by showing that plausibility (a rational and deliberate assessment of AR content) and local presence both impact utilitarian benefits, whereas local presence has a stronger effect on perceived physical tangibility. The findings . . . provide managers with important insights regarding the influence of context on downstream variables in their AR and metaverse marketing strategies.”

Simon von der Au, Phillipp Rauschnabel, Reto Felix, and Chris Hinsch.  “Context in Augmented Reality Marketing:  Does the Place of Use Matter?” Psychology and Marketing, in press, https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21814

Brinkman and colleagues enrich our understanding of how culture influences the experience of looking at art.  They found that people from Austria and from Japan moved their eyes differently when looking at European and Japanese art and photographs. The researchers go on to report that “Possibly those differences are related to reading/writing systems, but also to different cognitive expectations toward pictures: the equivalence of image and calligraphy in the Japanese tradition versus the habit to make and see pictures as window-like perspectival views of reality in the European Renaissance tradition. . . . for Japanese (and possibly Chinese as well) looking at a painting might be to a certain degree related toreading calligraphy, rather than looking at the world through a window. Writing with ideograms (Kanji) is per se a pictorial act. More importantly, in contrast to European paintings, traditional Japanese paintings have no sharp demarcation between calligraphy and painted image. Japanese scrolls used to decorate the walls of particular rooms (Kakemono/Kakejikus) can consist of images—with or without calligraphy—or of pure calligraphy.”

Hanna Brinkman, Jan Mikuni, Zoya Dare, Hideaki Kawabata, Helmut Leder, and Raphael Rosenberg.  “Cultural Diversity in Oculometric Parameters When Viewing Art and Non-Art.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000563

Zhang and colleagues link specific work activities and energy levels; their findings may be useful to designers developing at-work break/refreshment zones, for example. The Zhang-lead team found “a time allocation effect, such that for a given period of the workday (i.e., the morning or the afternoon), the greater the proportion of time a knowledge worker spent in meetings relative to individual work, the less this person engaged in microbreak activities for replenishment during that period. The reduction in microbreak activities, in turn, harmed energy. We also found a pressure complementarity effect in the morning (though not in the afternoon), such that when a meeting involved low pressure in the presence of high-pressure individual work or vice versa, when a meeting involved high pressure in the presence of low-pressure individual work, such complementarity benefited energy.”

Chen Zhang, Gretchen Spreitzer, and Zhaodong Qui.  “Meetings and Individual Work During the Workday:  Examining Their Interdependent Impact on Knowledge Workers’ Energy.” Journal of Applied Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001091

Darda and colleagues probed how culture influences preference for art.  They share that they “we explored Northern American and Indian participants’ aesthetic judgments and preferences for abstract and representational artworks. . . . no evidence was found for an ingroup bias . . . when American abstract artworks were assigned with fictional American, Indian, Chinese, or Turkish artist names. Aesthetic ratings for artworks were similar across Indian and American participants, irrespective of the cultural label they were assigned. . . . An ingroup preference for Indian and American/European representational artworks was found in Experiment 3—participants preferred artworks depicting content from their own culture compared to another. Effects across all experiments persisted when controlling for participants’ age, education, art experience, and openness to experience. The modulation of art perception and appreciation by contextual information may be flexible and more influenced by cultural content depicted in artworks than simple cultural framing.”

Kohinoor Darda, Alexander Christensen, and Anjan Chatterjee.  “Does the Frame of an Artwork Matter? Cultural Framing and Aesthetic Judgments for Abstract and Representational Art.”  Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000569

People who are lonely may, literally, perceive the world around them differently than individuals who are not lonely.  Baek and associates found via a functional MRI-based study that “lonely people may view the world in a way that is different from their peers. These findings raise the possibility that being surrounded predominantly by people who view the world differently from oneself may be a risk factor for loneliness (even if one socializes regularly with them). . . . one possibility is that lonely individuals do not find value in the same aspects of situations or scenes as their peers (and instead focus on other aspects of situations in an idiosyncratic fashion), perhaps because of differences in their preferences, expectations, and/or memories that can in turn shape how they attend to and interpret stimuli. This may result in a reinforcing feedback loop in which lonely individuals perceive themselves to be different from their peers, which may in turn lead to further challenges in achieving social connection.”

Elisa Baek, Ryan Hyon, Karina Lopez, Meng Du, Mason Porter, and Carolyn Parkinson. “Lonely Individuals Process the World in Idiosyncratic Ways.”  Psychological Science, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221145316

Aleem and Grzywacz studied how our aesthetic preferences change as time passes.  They determined that “A handful of studies that have measured aesthetic preferences at multiple moments show that preferences may change in as little as two weeks. . . . we measured aesthetic preferences for different colored objects at six-time points, spanning a month. We found that aesthetic preferences were not stable and tended to drift stochastically [randomly] over time. Small statistically significant drifts occurred already after 20 min, and large ones happened after 2 weeks. . . . instability was greater for ‘hard’ choices between colors that were close in chromatic space as well as in their average preference rank. Males were more unstable than females, and instability tended to decrease with age. Surprisingly, no personality traits were found to correlate with how the participants’ aesthetic preferences changed over time.”

Hassan Aleem and Norberto Grzywacz.  “The Temporal Instability of Aesthetic Preferences.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000543

Buckley found that different birdsongs have different effects on our mental health.  Buckley reports that “Mental health benefits of birdsong differ between bird species. . . . Benefits of birdsong for mental health provide an economic argument for conservation of bird species, assemblages and habitats; but we need to quantify the benefits of bird diversity, and of rare relative to abundant bird species. . . .  the benefits of birdsong may depend on particular bird species, e.g. since songs bring memories or emotions. . . . birdsong is not a single homogeneous parameter.”

Ralf Buckley.  2023. “Birdsong and Mental Health.”  Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 87, 102002, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102002