During the Spring each year, as our natural worlds are being reborn, we focus on preserving and enhancing our Earth more than at any other time of year. Earth Day was April 22nd, and most of us have been exposed to sustainability related activities in the not-too-distant past. Also, this year plans for reducing the US’s greenhouse gas emissions have been restarted as the new administration announces its priorities.
Creating spaces and objects that satisfy humans’ most fundamental requirements for positive life experiences is environmentally sustainable at a profound and terribly important level. When places and the things in our surroundings meet our core needs, we can think of them as psychologically sustainable. We are not motivated to change them.
Design serves our psyche’s most basic and powerful needs in sustainable ways by providing us with comfortable levels of control over our experiences, by supporting us in our efforts to do well whatever we’ve planned, and through enabling us to mingle with the people we want to spend time with.
In past columns we’ve talked about how workplaces can help us work to our full potential when we control as much of our micro environment as possible, while building and maintaining positive relationships with other people. But although we like control, we don’t want to have to choose between too many options (research indicates that 4 – 6 seems to be a limit).
We’re apt to think more creatively in areas featuring the color green (so it’s a good choice for the walls in any space where we’re trying to resolve an issue in an original way), and having all the people in a conversation sit at about the same height above the ground makes the flow of information from one person to another more collegial. Generally this means having all the chairs or sofas at the same or very similar heights.
There is an inherently sustainable aspect to having spaces that support basic needs. That is, we tend to want to keep such things in our lives; we’re not interested in replacing them. Replacing is a resource-consuming activity, whether we’re talking about an office setting where no one can concentrate effectively or a light bulb that produces a garish light.
Spaces that retain the same fundamental form have a positive, comfortable familiarity to us, which we find very desirable and which supports knowledge work. An exception being gradual evolution over the years that can actually prevent boredom. No space should ever stay exactly the same over time. When that is the case, we become bored, which has all sorts of negative consequences for our mental wellbeing and often also for our performance.
Areas with windows to the outdoors admit varying amounts of natural light from one time of day to the next and from one season to another. Objects made of materials such as leather or copper develop patinas. Beyond these sorts of naturally occurring changes, a space can remain consistent in terms of the experiences we have there without staying exactly the same. Even interior spaces that meet our core psychological requirements need to be painted from time-to-time and using different palettes that produce similar psychological effects allows a space to evolve while retaining its essential familiarity and value to its human users.
Doing design right can mean expending vast amounts of resources once (with needed upkeep over time), and that’s good for Earth and our wellbeing; and often for our wallets as well.
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.