Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: Cognitive Science-Informed Design Sustainable
When I was speaking at the January DesignWell conference in San Diego, it again became clear to me how determined many designers are to support the health of our planet. Cognitive science-informed design is fundamentally consistent with environmentally responsible design objectives, even when the topics researched have no apparent connection to sustainability – for example, when the findings to be applied relate to surface or light colors seen and mental performance. When design reflects and supports humans’ fundamental needs – to positively communicate, to accomplish the task at hand, and to refresh mentally, for instance – humans have fewer reasons to encourage changes to their world; and eliminating reasons to replace or change generally means resource use is optimized. Sure, humans get bored over time with the world around them – but they also find gradual evolution of the physical environments they’re in more desirable than radical change. “Evolution” instead …
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