Eating While Crowded (12-15-17)
Crowding is a subjective experience, in the same situation some people may feel crowded while others won’t. When we do feel crowded, we eat differently than we do when we don’t. Hock and Bagchi completed “six studies showing that crowding increases calorie consumption. These effects occur because crowding increases distraction, which hampers cognitive thinking and evokes more affective processing. When consumers process information affectively [emotionally], they consumer more calories.” When they feel crowded and are “given a choice between several different options, people select and eat higher-calorie items, but when presented with only one option, people eat more of the same food item.”
Stefan Hock and Rajesh Bagchi. “The Impact of Crowding on Caloric Consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research, in press.
Lunchtime Park Walks and Relaxation Spaces: Good Ideas (12-14-17)
Having parks near workplaces where employees can walk for 15 minutes at lunchtime can be good for business—and so can creating an at-work space where people can do relaxation exercises. A Sianola-lead team reports that “park walk . . . and relaxation . . . groups were asked to complete a 15-min exercise during their lunch break on 10 consecutive working days. Afternoon well-being. . . [was] assessed twice a week before, during, and after the intervention, altogether for 5 weeks. . . . park walks at lunchtime were related to better concentration and less fatigue in the afternoon. . . . Relaxation exercises were related to better concentration in the afternoon. . . . In addition, relaxation exercises were directly linked to lower levels of strain and fatigue in the afternoon. Our study suggests that on days on which employees engage in recovering activities during lunch breaks, they experience higher levels of well-being at the end of a working day.”
M. Sianola, C. Syrek, J. de Bloom, K. Korpela, and U. Kinnunen. “Enhancing Daily Well-Being at Work Through Lunchtime Park Walks and Relaxation Exercises: Recovery Experiences as Mediators.” Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, in press.
Researching with Social Media (12-13-17)
Tenkanen and team wanted to learn more about park use and chose some interesting research methods to do so. The researchers report that they “compared data from Instagram, Twitter and Flickr, and assessed systematically how park popularity and temporal visitor counts derived from social media data perform against high-precision visitor statistics in 56 national parks in Finland and South Africa in 2014. We show that social media activity is highly associated with park popularity, and social media-based monthly visitation patterns match relatively well with the official visitor counts. However, there were considerable differences between platforms as Instagram clearly outperformed Twitter and Flickr. . . . we show that social media data tend to perform better in more visited parks, and should always be used with caution. . . . Overall the results are encouraging in broader terms: Over 60% of the national parks globally have Twitter or Instagram activity, which could potentially inform global nature conservation.”
Henrikki Tenkanen, Enrico Di Minin, Vuokko Heikinheimo, Anna Hausmann, Marna Herbst, Liisa Kajala and Tuuli Toivonen. 2017. “Instagram, Flickr, or Twitter: Assessing the Usability of Social Media Data for Visitor Monitoring in Protected Areas.” Scientific Reports, vol. 7, article no. 17615.
Context Matters (12-12-17)
How abstract art is evaluated depends on nearby art. Tousignant and Bodner found when “average-beauty abstract target paintings were paired with either a low-beauty or a high-beauty context painting. . . . and . . . participants rated . . . context-target pairs. . . . Abstract paintings were deemed more beautiful when paired with the low-beauty (vs. high-beauty) paintings.” Study details: “context paintings were either of a similar (abstract) or different (representational) style, . . . context-target pairs were presented either sequentially or simultaneously.”
Cody Tousignant and Glen Bodner. “Context Effects on Beauty Ratings of Abstract Paintings: Contrast, Contrast, Everywhere!” Journal of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, in press.
Touch Sensitivity (12-11-17)
Research indicates that our skin is incredibly sensitive. Carpenter and his team determined “in a series of psychophysical experiments that humans can discriminate surfaces that differ by only a single layer of molecules.”
Cody Carpenter, Charles Dhong, Nicholas Root, Daniel Rodriguez, Emily Abdo, Kyle Skelil, Mohammad Alkhadra, Julian Ramirez, Vilayanur Ramachandran, and Darren Lipomi. “Human Ability to Discriminate Surface Chemistry by Touch.” Material Horizons, in press.
Co-Living Preferences (12-07-17)
Ikea recently polled people to learn more about their co-living related preferences. Co-living people share common spaces, even, sometimes, bathrooms. Since people may have been motivated to participate in the Ikea survey because they have some interest in co-living, data collected need to be used with care. Data gathered indicate that among the many thousands of participants to date, “people who are of all ages, and are in any life situation, from all countries, on average: would prefer couples, single women and single men in their community . . . prefer members to share equal ownership of the house . . . only want the common areas to come furnished and furnish their own space themselves . . . want house-members from different walks of life . . . are most comfortable sharing internet, self-sustainable garden and workspaces . . . don’t need their own private kitchen and would use the communal kitchen so they can have more flexible private space . . . want to make sure their private room is off-limits when they’re not home . . . think 4-10 is the right amount of people for a community . . . worry most about the potential lack of privacy . . . and finally, think the two biggest pros of living with others is having more ways to socialize and splitting costs and getting more bang for your buck.”
http://onesharedhouse2030.com/results/
Personality and Climate (12-06-17)
Our personality seems tied, at least in part, to the climate where we grew up. Since personality influences how people experience design/space, this link between personality and early living may explain consistencies found among user groups, and indicate reasonable design-response hypotheses based on user group locations, for example. Wei and his team undertook their project because “Human personality traits differ across geographical regions.” They established that “compared with individuals who grew up in regions with less clement [mild] temperatures, individuals who grew up in regions with more clement temperatures (that is, closer to 22 °C [72 degrees Fahrenheit]) scored higher on personality factors related to socialization and stability (agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability) and personal growth and plasticity (extraversion and openness to experience). . . . As climate change continues across the world, we may also observe concomitant changes in human personality.”
Wenqi Wei, Jackson Lu, Adam Galinsky, and 23 others. 2017. “Regional Ambient Temperature is Associated with Human Personality.” Nature, Human Behavior, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0240-0
Aesthetics and Alphabets (12-05-17)
Research indicates that human’s aesthetic preferences are reflected in the forms chosen for letters in alphabets and syllabaries (“in which characters represent syllables”). Price, reporting on the work of Olivier Morin, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, shares that writing systems such as Cyrillic, Arabic, Sanskrit and 113 others “share basic structural features. . . .: characters with vertical symmetry (like the Roman letters A and T) and a preference for vertical and horizontal lines over oblique lines (like those in latters X and W). . . . Morin found, on average, that about 61% of lines across all scripts were either horizontal or vertical, higher than chance would predict. . . . And vertically symmetrical characters accounted for 70% of all the symmetrical characters.” More insights: “’People appear to have an aesthetic preference for certain kinds of shapes and designs, and that preference seems to explain the writing systems we see,’ says Julie Fiez, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh . . . who was not involved in the study. . . . Morin found no evidence that scripts tend to become more horizontal or vertical over time, suggesting that the scribes who created them baked human preferences into the written word from the beginning.”
Michael Price. 2017. “Why Written Languages Look Alike the World Over.” Science, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/why-written-languages-look-alike-world-over.
Experience, Personality and Noise (12-04-17)
Experience may influence how distracting it is to hear background noise. Kou and team share that “Previous research has shown that background auditory distractors (music and sound/noise) have a more severe impact on introverts’ performances on complex cognitive tasks than extraverts (Dobbs, Furnham, & McClelland, 2011).” The Kuo-led group partially replicated Dobbs and team’s study, with Chinese instead of English participants, finding that when “Chinese participants . . . carried out three cognitive tasks with the presence of Chinese pop songs, background office noise, and silence. . . results did not reveal any differences in performance as a function of the distraction condition, nor was there a difference in performance between extraverts and introverts. The failure to replicate is explained in terms of habituation to [adjustment to] noisy environments among Chinese participants.” Fine-tuning these findings, using varying intensities of background noise, is in order.
Siyi Kou, Alastair McClelland, and Adrian Furnham. “The Effect of Background Music and Noise on the Cognitive Test Performance of Chinese Introverts and Extraverts.” Psychology of Music, in press.
Art Value and Artist Grief (12-01-17)
Research indicates that the value of art is tied to its creator’s psychological state; it seems reasonable to extrapolate from this study to the value of design solutions, for example. Graddy and Lieberman report that “Dates of death of relatives and close friends of 33 French artists and 15 American artists were gathered from electronic sources and biographies, and information on over 15,000 paintings was collected from the Blouin Art Sales Index and the online collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Musée d’Orsay, including more than 12,000 observations on price. . . . there is no evidence that the death of a friend or relative makes an artist more creative, and there is some evidence that prices of paintings are significantly lower [about 35%] during the first year following the year of death of a friend or relative [but this decrease usually doesn’t last longer than a year]. Furthermore, paintings that were created during this bereavement period are less likely to be included in a major museum’s collection.”
Kathryn Graddy and Carl Lieberman. “Death, Bereavement, and Creativity.” Management Science, in press.
Gender-Inclusive Bathrooms Send Positive Messages (11-28-17)
Chaney and Sanchez studied responses to gender-inclusive bathrooms; best practices for designing these sorts of rest rooms have been receiving a lot of attention recently, for example here: https://qz.com/933704/how-to-design-transgender-friendly-bathrooms-that-make-people-of-all-genders-feel-safe/. Chaney/Sanchez report that “While gender-inclusive bathrooms serve a practical function of providing a safe public restroom for transgender individuals, they may also signal identity safety [in other words, fairness] for women and racial minorities who may experience identity threat in organizations. . . . we demonstrated that women . . . and racial minorities (Blacks, Latinos; . . .) report greater procedural fairness [i.e., less discrimination] and a more positive gender . . . or racial . . . climate in organizations with gender-inclusive bathrooms compared to traditional bathrooms. Further, these effects were due to . . . gender-inclusive bathrooms. . . signaling more egalitarian social environments.”
Kimberly Chaney and Diana Sanchez. “Gender-Inclusive Bathrooms Signal Fairness Across Identity Dimensions.” Social Psychological and Personality Science, in press.
Cues and Eating (11-27-17)
Environmental cues encourage us to eat in particular ways. Joyner, Kim, and Gearhardt found that “In a cue-rich compared to neutral environment, (a) wanting [to eat was] greater whereas liking [of food] . . . remain[ed] the same, (b) feelings of hunger [were] greater, and (c) food consumption [was] greater.” The cue-rich environment tested was designed to bring the experience of being in a fast food restaurant to mind: it “included . . . booths. . . . [and] Menu boards with images . . . projected on large television screens. . . . restaurant-style food storage and preparation appliances were visible. . . .French fries were cooked in the kitchen immediately before participants arrived. . . . The neutral environment was an office space in the research laboratory, in this environment, text-only menu boards were printed on laminated paper and hung on the wall. . . . participants did not have a view of food preparation. . . . an air filter was used to ensure a neutral scent.” It is important to note that the foods whose consumption increased in the cue-rich space were those typically found in fast food restaurants.
Michelle Joyner, Sally Kim, and Ashley Gearhardt 2017. “Investigating an Incentive-Sensitization Model of Eating Behavior: Impact of a Simulated Fast-Food Laboratory.” Clinical Psychological Science, vol. 5, no. 6, pp. 1014-1026.
Carbon Dioxide and Sleep (11-22-17)
Carbon dioxide levels in sleeping areas affect how well we sleep. Mishra and colleagues conducted a related study: “Bedroom carbon dioxide level, temperature, and relative humidity were measured over 5 days, for two cases: open window or door (internal, bedroom door), and closed window and door. . . . Average carbon dioxide level for the Open conditions was 717 ppm . . .and for Closed conditions was 1150 ppm. . . . Absolute humidity levels were similar for both conditions, while Open conditions were slightly cooler (mean = 19.7 degrees Celsius . . .) than Closed (mean = 20.1 degrees Celsius . . .).” Sleep quality was significantly better when doors/windows were open than when they were closed. Study participants perceived that they slept more deeply in the lower carbon dioxide conditions. Objective measures indicated that they slept more efficiently and woke fewer times when doors/windows were open.
A.Mishra, A. van Ruitenbeek, M. Loomans, and H. Kort.”Window/Door Opening-Mediated Bedroom Ventilation and Its Impact on Sleep Quality of Healthy Young Adults.” Indoor Air, in press.
Shared Gardens – A Good Thing (11-21-17)
Naomi Sachs recently presented data from her dissertation (completed at Texas A & M University) at the Children’s Outdoor Environments and Healthcare and Therapeutic Design Meeting of the American Society of Landscape Architects. She reported on information gathered during her development of the Healthcare Garden Evaluation Toolkit (H-GET). Sachs found via her “surveys of patients, visitors, and staff . . . that both groups (patients/visitors and staff) were not as opposed sharing a garden as had been hypothesized. But as Naomi pointed out, this new evidence ‘doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t create separate gardens for staff; it just means that stakeholders (including staff!) should be consulted first, and the gardens have to be sited and planned carefully so that staff can best utilize them.’” When staff were asked “Do you think HC staff should be allowed to use the garden in their free time?” 98% responded yes; 87% definitely yes, 11% probably yes, 2.5% neutral, and .2% probably no. When staff were queried: “If this facility did have a separate garden for staff, would you use it?” 68% said yes, 26% were not sure, and 7% said no. When visitors were asked “How do you feel about staff using the garden in their free time?” 70% selected the response option “I like seeing staff use the garden in their free time,” 28% chose “I don’t mind seeing staff” and 1% picked “I would rather not see staff.”
“The Children’s Outdoor Environments and Healthcare and Therapeutic Design Meeting in Review.” 2017. The Field (American Society of Landscape Architects), https://thefield.asla.org/2017/11/16/the-childrens-outdoor-environments-....
Daylighting in the City (11-20-17)
Saratsis and his colleagues have developed an important resource for individuals concerned about human access to daylight in urban environments.
The Saratsis team reports that “Increasing urban density leads to a conflict between space-use efficiency and daylight access. . . . it is now possible to quantify the performance of detailed design proposals before construction. . . . . A simulation-based daylighting analysis procedure reveals the capabilities for both formulating more nuanced prescriptive zoning rules as well as for use by design teams. The procedure is used to evaluate the daylighting performance of 50 block typologies. . . . The analysis demonstrates that certain urban massing approaches (e.g., pencil towers on a contextual base) outperform conventional massing strategies. A . . . case study application of an actual city block shows that innovative urban massings can improve access to daylight for the massing itself as well as for neighbouring buildings. . . . The fact that a simulation-based approach may yield significantly larger buildable areas than current regulations suggests that design teams will be open to employ these innovative simulation approaches which anyhow only require limited extra effort to use.”
Seratsis, Dogan, and Reinhart describe and demonstrate their daylighting assessment tool (which is consistent with LEED v4 spatial daylight autonomy requirements) in detail in their article, and also outline, step-by-step, the algorithm used for their analyses. Anyone who wants to apply their technique should obtain a copy of the team’s article so that they are familiar with all of its parameters.
Emmanouil Saratsis, Timur Dogan, and Christoph Reinhart. 2017. “Simulation-Based Daylighting Analysis Procedure for Developing Urban Zoning Rules.” Building Research and Information, vol. 45, no. 5, pp. 478-491.
Multiple Research Methods Best (11-17-17)
Recent research by Day and O’Brien makes it clear how valuable it can be to gather information in several different ways when assessing experiences in spaces provided. A press release from Washington State University reports on their work: “Many researchers know that new high-efficiency buildings don’t typically get used as intended. . . . ‘I have seen people taping motion sensor light switches to keep their lights off, people placing popsicles on thermostats to turn on the heat, and even someone taping a quarter onto a window sill to reflect light onto a thermostat to turn on the AC,’ said Day. . . . . Occupants in the various studies often showcased poor energy efficiency behavior when looking strictly at the quantitative data. However, through interviews and other qualitative methods (i.e. survey stories), the researchers could understand and explain the behaviors. . . . [an] occupant complained their lights were frequently turning off when they were in their office because their motion sensor was around a corner. So, they put a toy Drinking Bird™ to continuously trigger the motion sensor, regardless if the lights were kept on when the office was empty. . . . ‘We were learning more about occupant behavior through open-ended answers in the surveys, versus just looking at the numbers,’ said Day. ‘There is a lot to be learned by looking at both qualitative and quantitative data. We can learn from people’s stories and their behaviors to further reduce energy consumption.’”
Day and O’Brien’s paper was published in Energy Research and Social Science.
“High-Efficiency Building Bloopers Revealed Through Occupant Studies.” 2017. Press release, Washington State University, https://news.wsu.edu/2017/11/13/high-efficiency-building-bloopers-reveal...
Wobbling on Bridges (11-15-17)
For most people, walking on a swaying pedestrian bridge is an unpleasant experience. Researchers share, at the web address noted below, tools for developing stable pedestrian bridges. As they state: “Modern pedestrian and suspension bridges are designed using industry standard packages, yet disastrous resonant vibrations are observed. . . . The most prominent example of an unstable lively bridge is the London Millennium Bridge, which started wobbling as a result of pedestrian-bridge interactions. . . . We develop foot force models of pedestrians’ response to bridge motion and detailed . . . models of crowd phase locking. We use biomechanically inspired models of crowd lateral movement to investigate to what degree pedestrian synchrony [simultaneous motion] must be present for a bridge to wobble significantly and what is a critical crowd size. Our results can be used as a safety guideline for designing pedestrian bridges or limiting the maximum occupancy of an existing bridge. The pedestrian models can be used as ‘crash test dummies’ when numerically probing a specific bridge design. . . . the U.S. code for designing pedestrian bridges does not contain explicit guidelines that account for the collective pedestrian behavior.”
Igor Belykh, Russell Jeter, and Vladimir Belykh. 2017. “Foot Force Models of Crowd Dynamics on a Wobbly Bridge.” Science Advances, vol. 3, no. 11, http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/11/e1701512.full
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