Coworking and Community (06-15-17)
Garrett, Spreitzer, and Bacevice investigated the development of community at coworking sites. They collected information via a qualitative study at an unnamed coworking space in a suburban Midwestern town. As the researchers explain, they identified two factors that contributed to the development of a sense of community (SOC) at their research site “1) social . . . motivation for community, and 2) autonomous structure and practices allowing members to . . . align their community involvement with their desire for community. . . . The autonomous and flexible structure at [the coworking group] allowed the level and quality of community engagement to reflect members’ desires. . . . At [the coworking group], the loose structure allows members to associate with the people they enjoy, when they want their company. . . . it was also important that members felt free to express their authentic selves. . . . Employee efforts to be authentic are often disrupted by political dynamics that employees must navigate, potentially leading them to portray what is deemed to be valued or expected.”
Lyndon Garrett, Gretchen Spreitzer, and Peter Bacevice. 2017. “Co-Constructing a Sense of Community at Work: The Emergence of Community in Coworking Spaces.” Organization Studies, vol. 38, no. 6, pp. 821-842.
Mortality and Green Spaces (06-14-17)
Women living in greener spaces have lower mortality rates. James and his colleagues report that “Green, natural environments may ameliorate adverse environmental exposures (e.g., air pollution, noise, and extreme heat), increase physical activity and social engagement, and lower stress. . . . Using data from the U.S.-based Nurses’ Health Study prospective cohort, we defined cumulative average time-varying seasonal greenness surrounding each participant’s address using satellite imagery. . . .We followed 108,630 women and observed 8,604 deaths between 2000 and 2008. . . . women living in the highest quintile [20%] of cumulative average greenness . . . in the 250-m[eter] area around their home had a 12% lower rate of all-cause nonaccidental mortality . . . than those in the lowest quintile [20%]. The results were consistent for the 1,250-m area, although the relationship was slightly attenuated [reduced]. These associations were strongest for respiratory and cancer mortality.” Race/ethnicity, smoking and socioeconomic status were eliminated as explanations for the effects found via statistical tools.
Peter James, Jaime Hart, Rachel Banay, and Francine Laden. 2016. “Exposure to Greenness and Mortality in a Nationwide Prospect Cohort Study of Women.” Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 124, pp. 1344-1352.
Seeing the Coast and Feeling Pain (06-13-17)
Tanja-Dijkstra and her colleagues linked seeing coastal scenes via virtual reality and experiencing less pain (even during dental treatments such as tooth extractions and fillings). They report that “Virtual reality (VR) distraction has become increasingly available in health care contexts and is used in acute pain management. However, there has been no systematic exploration of the importance of the content of VR environments. Two studies tested how interacting with nature VR influenced experienced and recollected [remembered] pain after 1 week. . . . In Study 1, nature (coastal) VR reduced both experienced and recollected pain compared with no VR. In Study 2, nature (coastal) VR reduced experienced and recalled pain in dental patients, compared with urban VR and standard care [local anesthetics]. Together, these data show that nature can improve experience of health care procedures through the use of VR, and that the content of the VR matters: Coastal nature is better than urban. . . . even though we included natural elements [for example, vegetation] in the city to provide a conservative test.” This finding is particularly important because VR experiences are possible when patients are in a number of different positions/situations.
Karin Tanja-Dijkstra, Sabine Pahl, Mathew White, Melissa Auvray, Robert Stone, Jackie Andrade, Jon May, Ian Mills, and David Moles. “The Soothing Sea: A Virtual Coastal Walk Can Reduce Experienced and Recollected Pain.” Environment and Behavior, in press.
Walking, Cycling, and Light Levels (06-12-17)
How do light levels influence the number of people walking or cycling? Uttley and Fotios answered that question by analyzing “Pedestrian and cyclist count data . . . using the biannual daylight-saving clock changes to compare daylight and after-dark conditions whilst keeping seasonal and time-of-day factors constant. . . . . Daylight increased pedestrian numbers by 62% and cyclist numbers by 38%. . . . These results show the importance of light conditions on the numbers of pedestrian and cyclists, and highlight the potential of road lighting as a policy measure to encourage active travel after-dark.”
Jim Uttley and Steve Fotios. “Using the Daylight Savings Clock Change to Show Ambient Light Conditions Significantly Influence Active Travel.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, in press.
Humans' Preference for Shiny Finishes (06-09-17)
Research by Silvia and his team confirms that people prefer shiny objects to matte ones. Silvia and colleagues share that “Researchers in the evolutionary aesthetics tradition have suggested that people prefer shiny objects because glossiness connotes water. We . . . present an experiment that manipulated the glossiness of metal objects. Young adults . . . viewed silver coins that were either dull or in ‘brilliant uncirculated’ condition as well as copper cylinders that were either rough and tarnished, polished with a brushed surface, or polished with a mirror finish. Ratings of attractiveness showed that people preferred the shiny over the tarnished coin and the glossy copper bar over the tarnished and brushed ones. These effects were not . . . due to perceived quality or implied effort.”
Paul Silvia, Alexander Christensen, Katherine Cotter, Tatyana Jackson, Corey Galvean, Tanner McCroskey, and Aaliyah Rasheed. “Do People Have a Think for Bling? Examining Aesthetic Preferences for Shiny Objects.” Empirical Studies of the Arts, in press.
Mirrors and Eating (06-08-17)
A press release from Nagoya University indicates that seeing ourselves while we eat affects how much food we consume. The reported findings have repercussions for the use of mirrors and mirror-like surfaces in spaces where people will eat and are particularly relevant, for example, in environments for older individuals who often dine alone. Researchers determined that “people eating alone reported food as tasting better, and ate more of it, when they could see themselves reflected in a mirror, compared with when they ate in front of a monitor displaying an image of a wall.” Previous research has shown that “People rate food as tasting better, and eat more of it, when they eat with company than when they eat alone.” The study reporting these new results was published in Physiology and Behavior and Ryuzaburo is its lead author.
“Lost Your Appetite? Try Inviting Yourself to Dinner.” 2017. Press release, Nagoya University, http://en.nagoya-u.ac.jp/research/activities/news/2017/06/lost-your-appetite-try-inviting-yourself-to-dinner.html.
Commuting and Control and Wellbeing (06-07-17)
Smith’s work verifies that having a comfortable level of control over our lives increases our wellbeing and it also supports adding bicycle storage rooms to office buildings. Smith found that “Active travelers are happiest with their commute trips. . . .For car and transit commuters, traffic congestion significantly decreases commute well-being and using the trip productively increases commute well-being . . . Data were collected from a web-based survey of workers . . . in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. with four modal groups: walk, bicycle, transit and car users. . . . along with travel mode, traffic congestion, travel time, income, general health, attitudes about travel, job satisfaction and residential satisfaction also play important individual roles in shaping commute well-being. . . . people who bike and walk to work are happier with their commutes and are relatively unaffected by traffic congestion compared to bus and car commuters.”
Oliver Smith. 2017. “Commute Well-Being Differences by Mode: Evidence from Portland, Oregon, USA. Journal of Transport & Health, vol. 4, pp. 246-254.
Equal Chair Heights (06-06-17)
Research by Baranowski and Hecht confirms that it's important for the seats of all people participating in a conversation to be about the same height above the ground. The duo reports that “Film theories have long proposed that the vertical camera angle influences how the scene and the character in it are interpreted. An elevated camera (high-angle shot) should diminish the qualities of the actor, whereas a lowered camera (low-angle shot) should elevate the actor in perspective as well as in the viewer’s opinion. . . . We filmed 12 actors in a scenario inspired by a TV show called Split or Steal, which features a one-time version of the prisoner’s dilemma. Subjects had to rate trustworthiness and attractiveness of the actors, and also judge if the actors would lie or tell the truth. We found that actors were rated as most trustworthy when filmed from eye-level, and less so when the camera was lowered or raised. Camera elevation had no effect on attractiveness. Also, personality ratings of the actors were not altered by varying camera angle.”
Andreas Baranowski and Heiko Hecht. “Effect of Camera Angle on Perception of Trust and Attractiveness.” Empirical Studies of the Arts, in press.
Courtroom Design Implications (06-02-17)
McKimmie and his colleagues probed how courtroom design influences opinions of defendants. They report that their “study examined the effect of courtroom design, and more specifically where the defendant was positioned (in an open dock, in an open dock guarded by a correctional officer, in a dock surrounded by glass, or at the bar table) on mock jurors’ perceptions of the defendant. The participants . . . described the defendant in more negative terms when the defendant was portrayed in either an open dock, glass dock, or in the presence of a correctional officer compared to when the defendant was portrayed as sitting at the bar table with the defence counsel.”
Blake McKimmie, Jillian Hays, and David Tait. 2016. “Just Spaces: Does Courtroom Design Affect How the Defendant is Perceived?” Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 885-892.
Nature and Disorder (06-01-17)
Kotabe, Kardan, and Berman studied how the appeal of viewed nature is influenced by the disorder present in it. They share that “Natural environments have powerful aesthetic appeal linked to their capacity for psychological restoration. In contrast, disorderly environments are aesthetically aversive, and have various detrimental psychological effects. But in our research, we have repeatedly found that natural environments are perceptually disorderly.” An explanation is provided for this paradox, based on the research conducted by Kotabe and his team: “nature scenes can be disorderly yet aesthetically preferred because the effect of naturalness on aesthetic preference is stronger than the effect of disorder on aesthetic preference. . . . . [in experiments conducted] the most ordered natural scenes were most aesthetically preferred and the most disordered built scenes were least aesthetically preferred, with orderly built scenes and disorderly natural scenes falling between in a nearly linear pattern. . . . Zen gardens may be very beautiful, but if one were to stumble upon an untouched natural landscape that is highly ordered like a Zen garden, it may be exalted into an aesthetic class of its own. . . . This paper suggests that order should be considered in the design of both greenspace environments and virtual environments.”
Hiroki Kotabe, Omid Kardan, and Marc Berman. “The Nature-Disorder Paradox: A Perceptual Study on How Nature is Disorderly Yet Aesthetically Preferred.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, in press.
Americans’ Color Preferences and Associations (05-31-17)
Harris Poll, on behalf of Sherwin-Williams, conducted the National Painting Week Color Psychology Study, collecting information from 2,201people over age 18 via an online survey. Among the interesting findings: “62 percent of Americans select[ed] blue as one of the colors they like most. The strong preference for blue is consistent across genders, regions and age. Many Americans also said they associate blue with calmness (45 percent). . . .The color black is the second-most popular color (32 percent), followed by red (31 percent). . . . The majority of Americans (58 percent) say that more vibrant colors should be used throughout the home rather than just neutral tones. . . . Generations see green differently. Millennials are more likely than older generations to most associate the color with energy (33 percent vs. 24 percent of Gen Xers2 and boomers3). Baby boomers are more likely than millennials to associate green with calmness (26 percent vs. 20 percent). Forty-two percent of Americans associate yellow with happiness; men are more than twice as likely as women (35 percent to 17 percent) to associate yellow with ‘weakness.’”
“Americans Say They’re Ready for More Vibrant Colors, but Many Still Play It Safe with Neutrals.” 2017. Press release, Sherwin-Williams, https://press.sherwin-williams.com/press/trade/releases/2017/2017-npw-study/
Touch and Consumer Behavior (05-26-17)
Streicher and Estes gathered evidence indicating that haptic, or touch-related, experiences have a significant effect on consumer behavior. They report that “Consumers often touch products before reaching purchase decisions, and indeed touch improves evaluations of the given product. . . . We show that grasping a . . . product increases . . . the likelihood of choosing [a haptically similar; “haptic” means ”touch”] product. . . . We also show that visually crowded rather than sparse product displays increase the effect of touch on choosing other haptically similar products. . . Our results suggest that by manipulating or mimicking the haptic features (e.g., shape and size) of objects that consumers grasp while shopping, marketers can develop packaging that . . . increase[es] choice of those products.”
Mathias Streicher and Zachary Estes. 2016. “Multisensory Interaction in Product Choice: Grasping a Product Affects Choice of Other Seen Products.” Journal of Consumer Psychology, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 558-565.
Supporting Opportunities to Give (05-25-17)
Work by Giebelhausen and colleagues indicates that there’s value in building support for charitable activities into retail spaces—for example: convenient spaces to place cash collection boxes near cash registers. The Giebelhausen lead team reports that “Checkout charity is a phenomenon whereby frontline employees (or self-service technologies) solicit charitable donations from customers during the payment process. . . . The present research examines checkout charity in the context of fast-food restaurants and finds that, when customers donate, they experience a ‘warm glow’ that [was linked to] store repatronage. . . . Managers often infer, quite correctly, that many consumers do not like being asked to donate. Paradoxically, our results suggest this ostensibly negative experience can increase service repatronage.”
Michael Giebelhausen, Benjamin Lawrence, HaeEun Chun, and Liwu Hsu. “The Warm Glow of Restaurant Checkout Charity.” Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, in press.
What We See (05-24-17)
New research confirms that people from different national cultures vary in how they perceive their physical worlds. The specific findings of the study discussed here are not as important as the determination that cultural variations exist. A research team lead by Yoshiyuki Ueda of Kyoto University reports that “an ability to perceive differences between similar images depends on the cultural background of the viewer. Scientists have long recognized that the mental processes behind thinking and reasoning differ between people raised in Western and Eastern cultures. Those in the West tend to use 'analytical' processing -- analyzing objects independently of context -- while those in the East see situations and objects as a whole, which is known as 'holistic' processing. . . . In looking for the one odd line out of a group, North Americans took more time when the line was shorter, rather than if it was longer. No such differences were seen in Japanese volunteers, who in contrast had a significantly harder time identifying a straight line among tilted ones.” Jun Saiki of Kyoto University adds that "’Our next step is to find the cause of this discrepancy. One such reason may be the orthographical [writing] systems the subjects see regularly. In East Asian writing, many characters are distinguished by subtle differences in stroke length, while in Western alphabets, slight angular alterations in letters result in remarkable changes in the reading of words.’" The paper detailing these findings is published in Cognitive Science.
“You Don’t See What I see?” 2017. Press release, Kyoto University, http://www.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/news/
Positive Memories a Plus (05-23-17)
Speer and Delgado report that thinking about happy memories enhances wellbeing when people are stressed. Their study “explored whether recalling autobiographical memories that have a positive content—that is, remembering the good times—can dampen the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis stress response.” Study participants were stressed psychologically by the researchers and the scientists then determined that “recalling positive, but not neutral, memories resulted in a dampened cortisol rise and reduced negative affect [mood] . . . . These findings highlight the restorative and protective function of self-generated positive emotions via memory recall in the face of stress.” The design of workplaces and other sorts of spaces can make it easier or more difficult for people to display objects, for example, that can bring positive memories to mind, such as photos taken during vacations.
Megan Speer and Mauricio Delgado. “Reminiscing About Positive Memories Buffers Acute Stress Responses.” Nature, in press.
More on Moving and Wellbeing (05-19-17)
Panza and his team investigated links between levels of physical activity and wellbeing. They learned that “light-intensity physical activity [was] positively associated with [subjective] psychological well-being . . . and negatively associated with depression . . . moderate intensity negatively associated with pain severity . . . and positively associated with psychological well-being; sedentary behavior negatively associated with psychological well-being and positively associated with depression. . . . Higher levels of sedentary behavior are associated with lower subjective well-being.” Design can increase neighborhood walkability and probable user physical activity/movement within buildings, for example.
Gregory Panza, Beth Taylor, Paul Thompson, C. White, and Linda Pescatello. “Physical Activity Intensity and Subjective Well-Being in Healthy Adults.” Journal of Health Psychology, in press.
Active Symbols (05-18-17)
Awad’s research indicates that the symbols present in urban environments continually evolve and that different groups have varying relationships with them. As she states, “Our urban environment is filled with symbols in the form of images, text, and structures that embody certain narratives about the past. Once those symbols are introduced into the city space they take a life span of their own in a continuous process of reproduction and reconstruction by different social actors. In the context of the city space of Cairo in the five years following the 2011 Egyptian revolution, I will look on the one side at efforts of activists to preserve the memory of the revolution through graffiti murals and the utilization of public space, and from the other, the authority’s efforts to replace those initiatives with its own official narrative.”
Sarah Awad. 2017. “Documenting a Contested Memory: Symbols in the Changing City Space of Cairo.” Culture and Psychology, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 234-254.
The Right Place (05-17-17)
Kushner’s text challenges readers to thoughtfully consider the role that architecture plays in people’s lives today and how design can support future users. As Kushner details, “Architecture impacts how you feel every day. . . . We can control this powerful force—we just have to start asking more from our buildings. . . . [the] architectural revolution is already upon us. The average person is more comfortable having an opinion about architecture today than ever before, mostly due to the dialogue enabled by social media. . . . Photographs shared on social media liberate buildings from their geographic locations, enabling a new level of public engagement. We experience architecture today with an unprecedented immediacy, creating fodder for a global conversation about buildings and their impact. . . . In this new world, one in which people are asking more from their buildings, architects are no linger bound by any single style at any single time. “
Marc Kushner. 2015. The Future of Architecture in 100 Buildings. TED Books, Simon and Schuster: New York.
Assigning Seats (05-16-17)
Corsello and Dylan Minor assessed how where people sit in a workplace influences their performance. Data collected over 2 years from thousands of employees at a large tech company with offices in the US and Europe determined that “neighbors have a significant impact on an employee’s performance.” The researchers “categorized workers into three types: productive workers, who completed tasks quickly but lacked quality; quality workers, who produced superior work but did so slowly; and generalists, who were average across both dimensions. . . . where groups of workers were clustered together, [the investigators] found that the best seating arrangements had productive and quality employees sitting beside each other, because each helped the other improve. . . . When productive workers were seated next to quality workers (and generalists were grouped together), [researchers] found a 13% gain in productivity (speed of work) and a 17% gain in effectiveness (fewer unresolved tasks) in that group. . . . these effects occurred almost immediately but vanished within two months.” Minor and Housman previously reported similar findings from closely related research.
Jason Corsello and Dylan Minor. 2017. “Want to Be More Productive? Sit Next to Someone Who Is.” Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2017/02/want-to-be-more-productive-sit-next-to-someone-who-is.
Like the blog posts you’re reading? Get access to Research Design Connections’ in depth research-based reviews of important design-related topics—and library of over 2,400 past articles on everything from aesthetics to zoo design—by subscribing ($99/yr.) to our monthly magazine at https://researchdesignconnections.com/product/rdc-subscription