It’s the beginning of a new year, and thus time for an article acknowledging temporal transitions – perhaps addressing trends in the last year or those projected for the year ahead.
Whenever I see one of these trend articles, I’m reminded of scenes in real life and in movies where a mother (it always seems to be a mother and not a father) says to a child who has just gotten in trouble for copying someone else’s poor behavior, “If everyone was doing ‘X’ would you do it, too? Would you think it was a good idea?” With ‘X’ being something such as jumping off the railroad bridge.
So this article isn’t about what colors will be popular next year, or similar topics. It is about the passage of time itself.
Time moving on has important implications for how we experience design.
We’re most comfortable in spaces that are familiar to us, not because they’re always exactly the same, but because changes made to them are pleasantly incremental. Life is more agreeable and less stressful when we have learned how to use a space to achieve desired objectives; and through comfort comes the mental states linked to doing high quality professional work.
We learn things such as the best places in a building to do certain sorts of work just as we ultimately find a favorite coffee shop that we return to over and over again. Remaining always the same gets boring and under-stimulating, however, so the color on the walls, the desk chairs, the tables worked at, the lighting system, etc., need to evolve over time, but not, ideally, all at once. Refreshing recharges users in a good way.
And that pragmatic, steady evolution is particularly important for most organizations trying to convey that they are currently successful. Design elements clearly linked to a bygone era – for example, the color teal – need to be used with extreme care, because they can bring thoughts of being old-fashioned or out of step to mind in viewers’ heads. Nonverbal communications are really powerful and likely to be taken as a much stronger indication of an organization’s professional orientation (and financial condition) than any easy to draft and circulate mission and value statements. Design costs money and continues in use over time, so messages it conveys carry much weight.
It’s important to remember that organizations may want to link to a proud company history or perhaps industry standard design themes – think for how many years law firms indicated they were effective with wood paneling – and that’s great. The point here is that some colors, furniture styles, etc., get clearly linked to periods of time to which association may not be desirable, and therefore need to be jettisoned when those eras end.
Biophilic design directly recognizes the passage of time, and we feel very comfortable in biophilicly designed spaces, again with positive performance ramifications. Biophilic design encourages the use of natural materials that will age gracefully. Some natural materials develop a patina, for example.
So now, it’s time to consider old times, new times and the same times – to optimize design excellence and human performance.
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.