Gjerde and Vale asked people walking along an urban street about their visual preferences. They report that “The appearance of the built environment is an important matter for most people, as it can affect their physical, financial and psychological wellbeing. . . . People were invited to indicate their preferences while walking along three streets in New Zealand cities. The survey responses were supplemented by two focus group discussions. . . .
Devlin’s study was conducted in doctor’s office waiting rooms but its findings can reasonably be extended to other sorts of places. Devlin reports that she studied “preference for five different seating arrangements (e.g., rows, clusters) in a doctor’s office waiting room . . . and how such choices may have changed over the pandemic (2013 vs. 2021). . . . Data collected in 2013 and 2021 used sketches of five different seating arrangements; people saw just one of these. . . . seating preferences favored end, not middle seats, and chair selections with the chair back to a wall.
Where would people prefer to give birth? Skogstrom, Vithal, and Wijk report that their “study was part of a . . . research project, including women . . . receiv[ing] care in a new birthing room designed with physical features changeable according to personal wishes. . . . The overall impression of the room was positive and exceeded women’s expectations. They felt welcomed and strengthened by the room, which shifted the focus to a more positive emotional state.
Suggestibility prevails!
Zu, Jiang, and Zhao evaluated preferences for landscapes that varied by season. They report that “Seasonality is a typical feature of landscapes in temperate regions. Seasonality’s effects on visual aesthetic quality (VAQ) are widely recognised but not well understood. . . . 10 sample sites were selected to represent the diversity of urban green spaces in Xuzhou, eastern China, which has a typical temperate monsoon climate. Photographs of the 10 sites were acquired in eight typical months to capture seasonality. Online surveys were used to evaluate the VAQ of the photographs. . . .
Straffon and colleagues assessed people’s responses to artworks that they created. The researchers report that “Self-made objects tend to be favored, remembered, valued, and ranked above and beyond objects that are not related to the self. On this basis, we set out to test whether the effects of self-relevance would apply to visual art, and via what mechanisms. In three studies, participants created abstract paintings that were then incorporated in a dot-probe task, pairing self-made and other-made stimuli. Our findings confirm that attention and preference are higher for self-made (vs.
In a study with applications beyond the specific research question investigated, Garay, Perez, and Pulga probed responses to color palettes used in paintings. They report that “Most existing literature has ignored the potential effects that color intensity may have on art prices. . . . We examine 1627 paintings executed by the “Big Five” Latin American artists (Rivera, Tamayo, Lam, Matta, and Botero), and sold at Sotheby’s and Christie’s between 2003 and 2017, to analyze this impact.
Yildirim and colleagues set out to learn more about how design influences user assessments of workplaces. They investigated, via a survey distributed in Ankara, Turkey, “the effects of location of closed offices on the front facade, rear facade and side facade plans and the indoor layout (left and right users’ cabinets) on perceptual evaluations of users of physical environmental factors. . . . it was determined that office users on the front and side facades generally perceived more positively the offices’ environmental factors than office users on the back facade.
Nanu and colleagues investigated how hotel lobby design influences opinions formed of hotels. They report that their “study investigates preferences of millennial and non-millennial travelers towards hotel lobby design concerning style (contemporary vs. traditional) and biophilic elements [plants] (present vs. absent). This quantitative study is designed as an online, virtual, scenario-based experiment. . . . The findings of the study reveal that the lobby interior design style has a significant impact on booking intention across different generations.
Rigorous research with users
