The Transdisciplinary Workplace Research (TWR) Network met recently. The practitioners, researchers, and practitioner-researchers doing the most significant and applicable office design-related work, worldwide, attended and key material discussed is shared here.
Some conversations are as easy as pie, they may even be about pie. Others deal with difficult issues, such as less that optimal professional performance. Neuroscience indicates how design can encourage those more challenging discussions to flow smoothly, whether the people talking are in the same place at the same time or connecting electronically.
What we feel against our skin, whether we’re touching something with our fingertips, walking across a surface, or sitting down, has a significant effect on our wellbeing and cognitive performance. Neuroscience research details how to design just the right “feelings” into any situation.
At any instant, most of us are receiving information via multiple sensory channels. How does what we see and hear and smell and touch (and sometimes even taste) merge in our brains and affect how we think and behave? Neuroscientists are answering that question.
Neuroscience research indicates that the effects of scents on our lives are robust, long-lasting, and present even when scent concentrations are extraordinarily low. What do designers and other people who are not actively working in the scenting industry need to know about managing the odors of spaces and objects?
Design can nurture wellbeing boosting retail experiences. Neuroscientists have established how design can meaningfully encourage sales in physical stores and online, all while elevating buyer and seller quality-of-life.
Neuroscience lays out how design can increase the likelihood that people feel happy. The upbeat repercussions of people being in good moods are varied and significant.
Sleep is essential for human wellbeing. Design can make it easier for humans to drift gently off into healthy sleep—and to stay asleep—whether they’re at home, at a hotel, in a hospital bed, or trying to take a nap break at work.
When we’re in a space, how energized or relaxed it makes us feel has a significant effect on how we think and behave. Neuroscience makes it clear how we can and should coordinate environmental vitality and planned activities.
Neuroscience research details how design influences user quality-of-life; not all design aligns with those research findings. The most common and meaningful of these wellbeing-, mood-, and performance-related misalignments observed in the real world are reviewed, along with the info needed to overhaul undesirable situations.