Several recent articles in the popular press have highlighted how stressful reviews – of projects, design and otherwise – can be. Understanding differences in the mindsets that are brought to the review process can lessen some of the “challenges” of frank discussions with clients.
Workplace designers and their clients assess novelty and other design criteria differently, although the fundamental ways that they each process sensory information are the same. While designers review design options and design decisions made, by themselves and others, for hours each day, their clients are simultaneously and separately reviewing financial spreadsheets and marketing programs or new distribution plans or something similar, almost never anything actually related to how their offices are designed. These hours spent influence familiarities built. And those in turn affect evaluations.
It is not surprising that the level of familiarity leads to variations in evaluations because each group assesses options presented in terms of what they’ve seen or heard in the past. And not all of these communication channels are necessarily pure – clients may have heard about the design of some workplace through a casual communication chain, e.g., cousins at a holiday dinner, and the information received may or may not actually be accurate.
So, what we’re familiar with influences what we like. Differences in familiarity lead to variations in surface colors favored, lounge furniture preferred, and to diverse opinions on everything else that finds its way into workplaces.
Designers are first apt to sense challenges ahead when colors come up. Yellow-yellow-green is the most disliked color among the general population, but designers have a more positive response to this shade because they have been exposed to it more frequently – hey, this color is close to that green shade that was popular in designers’ clothes, and only designers’ clothes, a few years back. Yellow-yellow-green is a color that clients are unlikely to be enthusiastic about but designers may propose. Exposure has a big effect on preferences, as well as what’s judged “acceptable.”
Design training also tends to make people with it more flexible, and potentially more adventurous, when they’re making assessments than non-designers.
Purcell (1995) found that when people with varying degrees of design training were asked for their opinions, “For novices, more prototypical houses were more attractive but less interesting, whereas less prototypical houses were more interesting but less attractive. For experts instead, less prototypical houses were both more interesting and more attractive. This pattern of results demonstrates that experience plays an important role in determining the scope and flexibility of someone’s…someone’s preferences.”
Neuroscientific research (Kirk, Skov, Christensen and Nygaard, 2009) addressed the issue of expertise and judgment, finding “that expertise not only modulates cognitive processing, but also modulates the response in reward related brain areas.”
Recently, Shemesh and his team (2017), when studying reactions to curvier and more rectilinear shaped rooms via virtual reality, “found that participants with no expertise in the field of design show a tendency to prefer curvy-shaped spaces and take significant interest in these spaces. Participants with a background in design displayed a tendency to prefer sharp-angled spaces.”
Training also brings more technical differences in design options top of mind that might otherwise be missed – for instance, the skill in fabrication or the use of a particular material. These can be positively received by those who note them, and that, again, can lead to variations in responses to options shared.
Knowledge of the differences that designers and clients bring to charrettes and design reviews makes handling comments received easier. At least a little easier!
Ulrich Kirk, Martin Skov, Mark Christensen, and Niels Nygaard. 2009. “Brain Correlates of Aesthetic Expertise: A Parametric fMRI Study.” Brain and Cognition, vol. 69, no. 2, pp. 306-315.
Terry Purcell. 1995. “Experiencing American and Australian High-and Popular-Style Hourse.” Environment and Behavior, vol. 27, no. 6, pp. 771-800.
Avishag Shemesh, Ronen Talmon, Ofer Karp, Idan Amir, Moshe Bar and Yasha Grobman. 2017. “Affective Response to Architecture – Investigating Human Reaction to Spaces with Different Geometry.” Architectural Science Review, vol. 60, no. 2, pp. 116-125.
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, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also 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.