The current focus on health and wellbeing has us constantly evaluating how we’re taking care of ourselves, and part of that conversation is our diet. It’s time to talk about designing to encourage healthier eating.
Research consistently shows that design influences how much we eat and how wholesome our food selections are. The cognitive science-based insights on designing for healthy eating have now moved dramatically beyond well publicized findings about the design of food displays, such as those in cafeterias. That work indicated that foods that are a little less convenient to pick up are less likely to be selected by diners.
More recent studies have shown that people who can see into the area where food was prepared and any food that remains there as they eat are apt to return more often to get additional servings and to eat more than people who couldn’t see into those prep areas. Not a terribly surprising finding but one that is very relevant as more homes and workplaces are designed with open plans.
Less predictable research findings indicate that in cluttered and disorganized spaces, people are more likely to make unhealthy food choices. Cabinet doors that block the view of items inside those cabinets, in break rooms and elsewhere, sound like a better and better idea.
Research also indicates that we’re more likely to choose healthier food options when we can see ourselves in a mirror (apparently, when we do we think unhealthy foods are less tasty). Seeing thin human-like sculptures, such as those by Giacometti, make it more likely we’ll choose to eat healthy foods. So does being in more brightly (but comfortably) lit spaces. People eating at restaurants at higher tables are more likely to select healthy food options than people at tables of conventional height. Also, people sitting at regular tables, not booths, order more vegetarian dishes and vegetable sides than people sitting in booths.
“Food altars” are places in offices where people share food from home with their coworkers. At-work “food altars” can make it difficult for people to maintain healthy diets, since often the items brought from home and shared are party or sweet fare that’s not too good for us. People working really hard to eat good-for-them food may make detours off their usual circulation routes to avoid food altars, which has positive implications if those trips result in professionally desirable interactions with others. They often lead only to inconvenience and longer transport times. It’s hard to regulate food altars because usually things brought from home end up on someone’s desk or in a break room that is centrally located. Moving food altars from locations where they distort employee travel in unwelcome ways and locating sources of good-to-drink water to encourage desired mingling are both good ideas.
Design can make it more likely that people eat more “wholesome” diets – and for many of us, our waistlines and health depend on it doing just that.
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.