The Butterfly Effect of Thoughtful Interior Design
In 2019, I designed a work-from-home office for the senior director of a large company in the area. She specified that it had to have a great background for her virtual meetings, she liked the color blue, and no flowers please. On the day we presented the finished room, I noticed her postured changed when she walked into the space, and I predicted she would receive a raise in a year. She did. The office was a huge success, and she told me she received a raise and a promotion the following year because of "how she showed up every day".
The bonus that came out of the project was that her two daughters got off the school bus every day and sat with her, she said sometimes for an hour, in the small sitting area I created by the window (we made it just for this reason). They had never done that before. How similar is this little seating area that brought her family together and the larger scale social connections architects foster in communities?
It is no surprise that architects looked to the psychologists, neurologists, and researchers to map out the cause and effect of the built environment to its inhabitants, as well as to its surrounding natural environment. Where the entrance is located, what direction the windows face, how the structure fits into the outside environment, and what the facade looks like all come into play.
"Architects and Designers have a greater ability to improve public health than medical professionals." -- Dr. Claudia Miller, Allergy and Immunology, University of Texas School of Medicine
Erin Peavy is an architect, researcher, and a self-described passionate advocate for the power of place to foster happier, healthier, more connected lives. Her sentiments agree with Dr. Miller's in that Interior Designers and Architects are public health workers, shaping the environments of where people live. Her emphasis on human connection rang true for how we approach our projects at Elan Design.
Here's what the brain and body are doing
At our core, humans seek two things: survival and pleasure.
In Neuroaesthetics in Interior Design - The Science, we talked generally about the parts of the brain in terms of "yes, I'm front and center", or "no, back away". Basically, we have an ancient brain with its more life-sustaining, instinctual, subconscious functions, and the modern brain, which is the center of rational thought. The modern brain takes information released by the ancient brain and converts that information to feelings, thought, memory, and action. 95% of all actions processed by our ancient brains are intuitive and subconscious, and all of them are geared toward these two specific functions, survival and pleasure. So where does our ancient brain get its information? Through our senses with a little mix of memories.
Our nervous system is command central for our being. This continuous communication between our brain and every cell in our body are electrical and hormonal in nature and divided into two main sections. The limbic nervous system is involved in motivation, emotion, learning, and memory. The autonomic nervous system is responsible for bodily functions like breathing, immunity, heartbeat and digestion.
This autonomic nervous system is further broken down into the "sympathetic" (survival) and "parasympathetic" (pleasure). In a sympathetic response, there are a handful of hormones our adrenaline gland releases. Cortisol releases to signal the body to slow down "non-essential" functions like reproduction, immunity, and cellular repair. And then the adrenaline and norepinephrine kick in to raise heart rate and narrow mental focus to put a person into survival mode. This is our fight, flight, or freeze response. This sense of stress and danger happens instantaneously and subconsciously. Prolonged periods of sympathetic stress are highly detrimental to our body.
On the other hand, the parasympathetic mode makes us feel calm and relieves stress. It gives us a sense of well-being and pleasure with hormones like endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin. In this state we feel love, happy, and peaceful.
Jo Marchant in Cure: A Journey Into the Science of Mind and Body (2016), said, "when (a person) feels cared for and secure, rather than under threat, this alone can trigger significant biological changes that ease our (high stress) symptoms."
It's Beautiful
I often reference Don Ruggles. A practicing architect for almost 50 years, he serves on several Boards of Advisors and is a solid leader in this field of neuroaesthetics. He defined the word "beauty" in incredible detail in his book Beauty, Neuroscience, & Architecture: Timeless Patterns & Their Impact On Our Well-being.
It turns out that beauty has an incredible impact on our well-being. When we see a broad view of the sunrise over a body of water, a composed garden, or when we look at the stars in the sky, "beautiful" seems to roll off our tongues.
"Of great importance, our living environment plays a key role in whether we are in pleasure or stress mode." -- Don Ruggles, AIA
Ruggles explains further that there's a 3-step process that we go through to call something beautiful.
The brain contains chemicals that create an appetite for pleasure. This fuels our mind to seek new experiences, also known as curiosity.
If curiosity is met with reward, it results in the release of dopamine, serotonin and endorphins into the blood stream.
This happy hormone release gives us a feeling of pleasure and often leads to proclaiming something is beautiful.
This feeling of beauty promotes homeostasis, or, as I like to use the word, balance. Art and our surroundings play a major role in relieving stress. Scientists have found that the emotion of beauty neutralizes a high stress sympathetic reaction. The psychology of beauty in our surroundings goes far beyond what we've understood to be true. What was known to be a luxury is now proven to be a necessity.
As our society struggles with an epidemic of stress and depression, enjoying beauty in our own environments is an easy, and oftentimes free, method of creating health and balance in our lives. -- Eryn Oruncak, SIDC, ASID
So, what makes something aesthetically appealing?
Pattern Recognition
Millions of years ago, modern humans would recognize that an open savannah with spaced trees, water, and a place for shelter was safe and habitable. Over time, the recognition of this pattern associated with the savannah would trigger physical relief.
Pattern recognition meant survival at some point in our evolution. Throughout our evolution, these powerful reactions to the patterns in our environment encoded themselves into our genetics and are still present today.
We dive into Biophilia in Neuroaesthetics in Interior Design - Biophilia, but let's touch on fractals here. Fractals are similar geometric patterns that repeat at different sizes. We see them in nature, as well as within our own bodies. This harmony between the outside and the inside creates familiarity and sense of pleasure.
Our primitive brain knows that patterns lead to pleasure and well-being. There's a 3 x 3 pattern, also known as the magic square. It looks like a tic-tac-toe board and is the basis of notable buildings and artworks throughout history.
When we're born, our very first instinct is to look for a face, which means survival and care. This instinct to bond activates a neurological pathway that releases endorphins, creating a sense of pleasure. Maybe you've "seen" faces in objects before? Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander explain in their book, Cognitive Architecture, Designing For How We Respond to the Built Environment, that we are predisposed to look for faces, and research has shown that even when the object is not human, a face-like object engages us emotionally without conscious effort. Architects have discovered through eye-tracking that people are more drawn to building facades that have face-like qualities over streetscapes that lack them.
"It is almost as though the designers of these buildings were copying the pattern they knew best, the one programmed into our brains and so significant for survival: the face." -- Ann Sussman, Architect, Researcher, and College Instructor, Founder and President of The Human Architecture + Planning Institute
The Relationship of the Place to the Person
Tye Farrow, Senior Partner, Farrow Partners Architects, continually explores how intentional design can foster health-focused, person-to-place relationships as meaningful as our person-to-person connections.
Through research at the emerging intersection of neuroscience and architecture, Farrow explores how our mind – and its various sensory systems – interacts with our built environment to enhance or harm our health and well-being in his book Constructing Health - How the Built Environment Enhances Your Mind’s Health.
"We often focus more on function, program, and what a building is, and less on the “effects” the design solutions have, what a building does, and the type of relationship it will form with us. Will it simply be transactional in achieving its function, or will it be health-giving and – by design – generous in what it offers the people that use it every day?" -- Tye Farrow
There's an overall composition in a well-designed room that has a significant impact on how our brain and body experience that space. Translating this observation is one of the core values of Elan Design. We create custom spaces to serve our clients. We ask what feelings they would like to have in that space, and equally importantly, what do they need to accomplish there. We then translate that into the colors and textures in the space, along with the natural elements that resonate with them.
Remember everyone has their own perception of their ideal environment, so we're constantly mindful of the brain's Default Mode Network. The DMN for us steers the ship when we navigate through the myriads of decisions that go into creating a cohesive space, and one that establishes a relationship with our clients.
In Your Brain on Art, Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross explain that the DMN is a neural pathway that controls memories, a collection of events, and knowledge about yourself. It's where you daydream and envision your future. The Default Mode Network is a filter for what you know to be true in terms of beautiful or not, memorable or not, meaningful or not, and is what helps to make the arts and aesthetics a very personal experience. For Elan Design, our ultimate responsibility is optimizing the relationship of the place-to-the-person. Inherently, the relationships of the people-to-people follow suit.
It gives us great pleasure to announce that Elan Design is among the earliest recipients of the SIDC Certification.
This is what we do, what we've always done.
At Elan Design, we know what to plan in the very beginning of your projects, the best ways to illuminate a space, and instinctually know what may be feeling off in a room. Our Room Reading is a great way to identify the energy that your existing pieces are creating in a space, and advise on layers that may be missing.
To have a completely customized space designed by us, consider our Full-Service Offering. As always, we're happy to join you on a call to talk about how we can help you make the most out of where you live.
If you have questions, click here to get in touch with us. Tell us what resonated with you. Do you see faces in buildings? Did I inspire you to see your environment in a new way? What's the relationship you have with your home.
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