Design Preferences

Li, Zhai, Dou, and Liu studied how landscape preferences vary from situation to situation.  They determined that “college students in varied moods all prefer natural landscapes and open view landscapes, a result that is consistent with previous research. . . . there are significant differences in the degree of naturalness of the preferred landscape among college students with different moods. . . .  instead of a natural landscape, most respondents in a fatigued mood preferred a nature-dominated landscape with a small amount of built environment. . . .

Jeon, Han, and Namstudied how preferences for particular color vary.  They report that “designers and marketers often use a mix of colors whose harmony must be taken into consideration, which includes choosing whether to use colors placed next to each other on the color wheel (analogous combination) or to combine colors that are opposite each other (complementary combination). . . .

Vellei  and colleagues studied how preferred air temperatures vary from one time of day to another.  They report that their efforts reveal “some evidence of a time-varying thermal perception by using: (1) data from about 10,000 connected Canadian thermostats made available as part of the ‘Donate Your Data' dataset and (2) about 22,000 samples of complete (objective + ‘right-here-right-now' subjective) thermal comfort field data from the ASHRAE I and SCATs datasets.

Altmann, Brachmann, and Redies manipulated the colors originally used by artists in abstract paintings and identified important implications of particular color choices. The trio reports that “Despite the great diversity in the use of color between epochs, there are some surprisingly stable and unifying features in chromatic properties across visual artworks. For example, artists’ palettes seem to be biased toward the yellow-red [including orange-] range of the spectrum.