Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: Planning for Maintaining

In an individualistic culture such as the United States, users will fiddle with any space provided. The souls of people from individualistic cultures cannot rest without changing things – the inability to do so generates stress that diverts them from whatever work they’re being paid to do. Even a place that somehow manages to align with what workers need to do and how they can best do whatever that is will be modified. And, perhaps most horribly for the original designers, those modifications will come at the hands of people without any design training or related expertise.

Building-in opportunities for users to make changes without uglying-up spaces is a good idea. Consider whether furniture can be shifted and visual barriers added or be height adjusted, for example.

Building-in options for modifications helps keep a space looking and feeling good, and so does selecting materials that will wear well, under expected conditions, for a very, very long time. Employees “read” the physical environments provided to them, looking for clues about management opinions. When flooring looks grubby, upholstery seems to evaporate, or materials chip away, for example, the message received by workers is clear: “Management doesn’t care about us/Management doesn’t respect what we do.”

It’s important not to go overboard when considering material wear and life. Few design options are as disheartening to workers as cinder block walls, for example. Durability/wear needs to be an active topic of discussion when spaces are being designed, but options selected can’t even whisper that they were selected to be indestructible – unless you’re building silos for military use during nuclear attack.

Actively considering who’ll be using workplaces and the messages they like to “hear” during the design process, and developing workplaces accordingly, keeps employees efficient and effective for long after a space is turned over to the client.

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.