interior design psychology

Varlander has reviewed the workplace experiences of employees of a Swedish firm that implemented an open space office design.  Data were gathered several years after changes were made to the workplace using interviews and by observing at the firm.

Are you a morning person or an evening person?  New research indicates that the answer to that question can help you determine when you should tackle tasks that require creative thought.  Wieth and Zack describe their creativity-related study: “participants solved insight . . .  problems at their optimal or nonoptimal time of day . . .

Designers have been carefully considering the future of the workplace for quite some time.  Advanced Workplace Associates has collected information that they’ll find useful.  The researchers learned that “Employees in the early stages of their career prefer to work at the office to see and be seen.”  Discussing this research, Andrew Mawson, Managing Director at Advanced Workplace Associates stated, “’the main surprise is that a daily presence in the office i

Public health researchers have probed the influence of color coding food and the design of food displays on consumption of healthier and less healthy meal options.  As they describe their project “We assessed whether a 2-phase labeling and choice architecture intervention would increase sales of healthy food and beverages in a large hospital cafeteria . . .  Phase 1 was a 3-month color-coded labeling intervention (red = unhealthy, yellow = less healthy, green = healthy).

Are you working with someone for whom scents, from new carpets or building materials, for example, are a really important issue?  New dissertation research by Linus Andersson at Umea Universitet (Sweden) indicates that people who are very sensitive to scents do not adjust as well to smells as others.  Therefore, finding products for smell-sensitive clients with the correct “scent profile” may be quite difficult and an issue that can’t be resolved by suggestions to ignore odors.

British psychologists have learned that all that time we spend sitting at work has repercussions beyond the size of the posterior we’re sitting on. Dr Myanna Duncan, Mr. Aadil Kazi and Professor Cheryl Haslam from the Work & Health Research Centre, Loughborough University, presented their workplace-based research January 13 at the British Psychological Society's Annual Occupational Conference.

Researchers at Baylor have collected additional evidence regarding the ways in which place communicates nonverbally.  Their findings are consistent with earlier research on voting places and decisions made by voters.  LaBouff, Johnson, and Finkle found that “’people [asked to answer survey questions] near a religious building reported slightly but significantly more conservative social and political attitudes than similar people near a government building,’ said co-author Wade Rowatt, Ph.D., associate

Gray explores the influence of interpersonal interactions on experience.  Reviewing his findings he states “This research examined . .  . whether physical experience is influenced by the interpersonal context in which stimuli occur. Specifically, three studies examined whether perceiving benevolent intentions behind stimuli can improve their experience .

Bagchi and Davis have completed research on how the manner in which options are presented influences choices made, which complements existing work in the field.

People doing or using design research won’t be surprised by O’Brien and Ellsworth’s recent findings.  Their work “suggests that the same experience is viewed as better simply because people are aware that it is the last in a series, and this awareness influences subsequent evaluations and preferences. . . .