Design + Science

• Smells influence how we perform and perceive situations.  Smelling lemon improves performance on cognitive tasks (so people taking licensing board exams, for example, should suck on lemon drops), while the smell of peppermint improves performance on physical tasks.  People should rub peppermint scented lotions on their bodies before they start to exercise and sweating will further release the peppermint smell – which makes people work out longer and find their workouts easier.  People smelling lemon report fewer health complaints, so using lemon scented products in healthcare facilities can be a good or bad thing, depending on your perspective (physician vs. insurance company).
• We judge how far we are from other people, in part, by how they look to us.  We combine our visual impressions with other cues to determine our distance from others – and those perceptions of distance matter because they determine how formally or informally we act.  Sound bounce is a bit of information we use to judge distance.  Spoken words that reflect off of a higher ceiling make the person speaking seem farther away (and therefore make interactions more formal) than spoken words bouncing off lower ceilings, which make people seem closer together.
• Warm colors attract us – which is not surprising because fires are red/orange and before we had so many modern conveniences (such as heat), we would have been drawn to the warmly glowing heat of a fire.  Retailers use this info to draw people into high margin areas of stores or to move people through stores in a desirable way (generally to the back of the store so that people walk by lots of merchandise). 
• Continuing on the evolutionary theme – we like to be in places with lower ceilings than the surrounding areas and that are a little less brightly lit than the spaces we have a view into.  This is also consistent with our evolutionary past – when early humans were in a place that provided this sort of “cover” they were probably protected and safe.  Similarly, the pattern of light that we find most comfortable is the sort of dappled light that passes through the leaves of trees on a sunny day (imagine bright dollops of light on a generally dark floor).
• Personality influences how we respond to spaces.  People who are extraverts love to be in sensorially rich places, while introverts prefer to be in less sensorially rich places – spaces that extraverts love can overwhelm introverts.  Extraverts are also more apt to use couches in their homes than individual chairs (introverts have reverse furniture preferences), and introverts are interested in having walkways that are wide enough so that eye contact can be avoided if desired.  Introverts appreciate it when there is a focal point (such as a fish tank) in a room to which they can divert their gaze, as needed.  That focal point allows them to gracefully break eye contact, they have an excuse to look away (“what are those fish up to now?”).  Since people with similar personalities tend to do similar jobs, consider extraversion/introversion when laying out a workplace – if you create a space for extraverted salespeople to work where they can catch each others’ eye while seated at their desks, the urge to speak will be so strong that the extraverts will spend all day talking, and not necessarily about work related topics.  Lots of other personal factors influence how people respond to a space – even whether people feel controlled by fate or if they feel more in control of their own destiny has an impact on optimal space design. 
• Light color influences how we respond to the world around us.  Warm white light puts us in a positive mood and makes us more interested in resolving disagreements through discussion – but it also makes us assume more risks.
• People do a good job at “reading” places to learn about the people who have created and use them.  As a matter of fact, people often put more stock in what a place “says” than what the people using it say out loud – the place is seen as a truer expression of sentiments.
• Cross-corner seating is desirable in all situations.  It allows both men and women (who prefer to sit in different orientations to others) to feel comfortable.  Also, when seated across the corner from each other, people can establish or break eye contact as appropriate.
• Saturation and brightness influence our psychological responses to colors.  Colors that are less saturated and more bright are more relaxing and pleasant, for example.  But colors need to be used carefully across cultures, because different cultures can have opposite reactions to the same hue – for example in some countries red is seen as a lucky hue and in other countries it is seen as unlucky.
• We like to see nature scenes outside our windows or in paintings we own – but the nature scenes we like best are not entirely natural.  The ones preferred have clumps of trees and a water feature – but there are meadows of short, mown grass between these elements.  Images that reproduce intense jungle vegetation make us tense.  In addition, abstract images should never be used in healthcare settings – it is too easy for people who are under a lot of stress or who are medicated to “see” something malevolent in those abstract forms.

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