Design Preferences

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.

Duran-Barraza and colleagues evaluated how titles influence responses to artistic photography.  They report that “Conceptual information is central to the field of artistic photography. . . . we investigated whether artist's conceptual titles affected viewers’ interest in artistic photographs. Experiment 1 showed that adding artist's conceptual titles increased both the rated liking of and interest in the photographs, whereas adding a descriptive title had no effect.

Chuquichambi and colleagues’ work confirms that humans prefer curved lines to sharp angled ones.  The research team reports that “Lines contribute to the visual experience of drawings. People show a higher preference for curved than sharp angled lines. We studied preference for curvature using drawings of commonly-used objects drawn by design students. We also investigated the relationship of that preference with drawing preference. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed preference for the curved drawings in the laboratory and web-based contexts, respectively.

Greenberg and colleagues probed links between personality and preferred music styles and it seems likely that their findings can be applied more generally.  The team report that they “built on theory and research in personality, cultural, and music psychology to map the terrain of preferences for Western music using data from 356,649 people across six continents. . . . the patterns of correlations between personality traits and musical preferences were largely consistent across countries and assessment methods.