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Home Lifestyle Arts What science say about the effect of workspace design on our minds

What science say about the effect of workspace design on our minds

Biophilic design elements in offices can help reduce stress
What science say about the effect of workspace design on our minds
A pleasant aesthetic experience activates multiple brain areas involved in processing rewards and emotion processing

The global “human-centric” workplace market size was valued at $9.1 billion in 2023 and has been estimated to reach $21.5 billion by 2032. Many organizations are prioritizing the well-being, productivity, and satisfaction of their employees when creating work environments to meet the ever-evolving demands of today’s workforce.

Natural lighting, ventilation and temperature optimization, acoustic design, ergonomic furniture and accessories, and flexible layouts that accommodate individual choices of how and where to work are some key features in human-centric workspaces. To further emphasize the importance of employee wellness, amenities such as spaces for relaxation and social interaction, fitness facilities, and even on-site counseling services are being incorporated as well. Aesthetics, however, I would argue, should remain an integral part of workspace design beyond being “just the aesthetics”.

Aesthetic preferences

The human brain is hardwired to constantly make aesthetic judgments, most of which are unconscious. These judgments influence our decision-making processes to varying degrees in many of our day-to-day activities, including making purchases and choosing where to spend our free time.

Most of our aesthetic preferences, in turn, could be traced back to our evolutionary roots and functionality adapted to the natural environment. For instance, our visual system has evolved to efficiently identify colors and contours to facilitate object recognition and guide our sensorimotor responses that are beneficial to our survival.

Research has found that colors that signify safety and health in nature (e.g., red and orange in ripe fruit, cyan and blue in clean water bodies) are universally preferred over those associated with the opposite, despite some notable individual differences. Furthermore, an affinity to visual patterns and features resembling those common in the natural environment has been well-documented.

About 20 years ago, Swiss psychologist Rolf Reber and colleagues proposed the Processing Fluency Theory of Aesthetic Pleasure, where he argued that perceived beauty in many domains, including music, art, and the environment, depends on the ease of processing of these external stimuli by our sensory systems. Reber’s theory has been supported by decades of research and remains influential in the Psychology of Aesthetics and Art. In a nutshell, what is literally easy on the eye (our visual system) is indeed pleasant to look at.

Read: How the creative economy drives growth in the Middle East

Benefits of well-designed spaces

Understanding the primitive origins of aesthetic pleasure does prove useful for many practitioners in the field of architecture and interior design whose jobs involve recreating beauty in our built environment. The recent trend of incorporating biophilic design elements into living and working spaces is one prime example. The emphasis of biophilic design is to reconnect the occupant to nature using natural materials and lighting, abundant presence of greenery, water, and other features that promote human-nature interactions.

Being exposed to an aesthetically pleasing, close-to-nature environment has many benefits to psychological and physiological health. A pleasant aesthetic experience activates multiple brain areas involved in processing rewards and emotion processing, such as the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex — much like the satisfaction of indulging in chocolates and romantic relationships, without the calories and heartbreaks!

The positive effect elicited by repeated positive aesthetic encounters, especially ones that align with our innate biophilia, increase subjective well-being, reduce stress, and facilitate recovery from attentional fatigue, not only psychologically but also physiologically, indicated by the cardiac, hormonal, and cortical changes that are signatures of stress reduction. These, in turn, might translate into enhanced cognitive performance essential to increase productivity in the workplace.

office design
Aesthetics should continue to be a key element in workspace design

Unique opportunities

Much of the evidence discussed above has come from numerous research studies around the world that exposed their participants to purely natural, semi-natural, or artificially built environments with natural or nature-inspired elements.

In the MENA region, there are unique opportunities to embrace biophilic aesthetics in workspace design, given the region’s diverse climate and landscape, rapid urbanization, economic growth, and its increasing awareness and commitment to sustainability. Green spaces filled with low-maintenance local flora, local craftsmanship using locally sourced stone, clay, wood, and fiber, abundant sunlight that can be directed into the workspace as a natural light source, as well as traditional architectural wisdom such as Mashrabiya to create shading and ventilation, are just some of the examples of how human-centric design can be implemented in our offices. These designs tap into our instinctive psychological needs to cultivate a healthier and more productive workforce.

About the author

Dr. Pik Ki Ho is a cognitive psychologist and an assistant professor of Psychology at Heriot-Watt University Dubai. Her research explores the field of empirical and neuroaesthetics, which examines the psychological and neurological processes involved in aesthetic appreciation of art, architecture, and everyday objects.

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