Modern decor may be straining people's brains

Article URL: https://studyfinds.com/modern-decor-may-be-straining-peoples-brains/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873424

Points: 264

# Comments: 254

Hacker News 讨论

264 points · 255 comments · 查看原帖

michaelchisari
If you've ever been in an home owned for generations, filled with books and knickknacks and heirlooms and family photos, despite the clutter it all feels comforting in a way that modern decor doesn't. The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did. It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice. Companies are either expanding or like to think they'll be expanding soon. People move jobs so often that they have a hard time feeling settled where they are, so they design for that possibility. The modern aesthetic is one of planned impermanence.
bob1029
The biggest revelation I've had regarding interior design is to stop using overhead lights. Anyone who has ever worked in the games industry will tell you that lighting is the most important element of what makes a scene look a certain way. The crazy thing about lamps is you can put them anywhere. They only use a constant amount of power regardless of scene complexity. Lighting in my GPU is definitely more expensive. When everything in your house is illuminated from point lights stuck in holes in the ceiling, you only get a visual hierarchy along an axis you mostly cannot use (Y/up/down). When the lights are positioned at vertical midpoints, you get visual hierarchy on the X-Z (horizontal) plane which is generally how we are viewing our environment. The layering of shadow and highlights across a room are a lot less stressful to interpret. You can use a lot less total light and still conv
idopmstuff
The Limitations section at the bottom certainly has a lot of limitations: > This paper is a review, meaning it synthesizes and interprets existing research rather than presenting new experimental data. The authors themselves note that current visual tests for susceptibility to discomfort are subjective and poorly standardized. They also acknowledge that the proposed mechanism (that discomfort is the brain’s response to overwork) has not been fully tested, particularly the hypothesis that colored tints reduce discomfort by steering visual stimulation away from overactive brain areas. The relationship between the brain’s excitatory and inhibitory chemical signals and visual discomfort also remains, in their words, “unsettled.” Several key research questions are flagged as unresolved, including how to best quantify the real-world impact of visual stress on people’s lives and how to objectiv
Alien1Being
This book by Frida Ramstedt walks through the principles of interior decor, without touting the latest trend. There are no pretty pictures in it, just text discussing basic principles. https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/0593139313 The Interior Design Handbook by Frida Ramstedt For our new house, I used this book along with an experienced interior designer and discussions with a number of interior designers. Far from being expensive, the designer probably saved us around 10 times her charges, by gently pointing out more practical and durable alternatives to my half baked ideas. And we ended up with a nice cozy, accessible, human friendly house. For our garden, we used a garden designer ( not a landscape designer, they just stick hard surfaces everywhere ) who specialises in Piet Oudolf's New Perennial style.
meindnoch
>Eyes and brain alike evolved over millennia to process natural scenes, forests, rivers, coastlines, open skies. These environments share a specific mathematical pattern: their visual complexity decreases predictably as you zoom in on finer and finer details. Wut? It's precisely the opposite. Natural patterns have infinite complexity as you zoom in, and human-made patterns (most often) not.
jmbwell
One characteristic that differentiates contemporary design from all our grandparents’ houses is transience rather than permanence. Design immediately following WWI was largely about calm and comfort; the emergence of the den, cottage-cozy, spaces for reading, listening to the radio, etc — stability, calm, people wanted everything the war wasn’t. Immediately following WWII was different in different parts of the world but especially in North America there were all these industrial manufacturers wanting to sell The Future, and you get on the one hand gleaming kitchen-forward spaces and two car garages and rooms for entertaining. Less built-in bookshelves, more built-in HiFi. And on the other hand, the sort of refuge or counterpoint, more integration with nature, more natural materials, exposed timber and vaulted ceilings and giant windows, frank lloyd wright. And in all these cases, the id
sirwitti
One aspect that is often overlooked is a room acoustics - especially reverb time. Have you ever felt cosy in a large church? Or, if you have ever been to a wedding and wondered why everybody started talking louder and louder and it's hard to understand, a room with too large reverb time is a very probable causes. This is very draining mentally. The same goes for living spaces, especially since newer homes tend to use lots of smooth surfaces like glass, tiles and concrete, which increase reverb time a lot. Book shelves, curtains and furniture will increase a room's diffusiveness and reduce reverb time, making rooms feel so much better.
indymike
A few small things (from the perspective of the suburbs in a large flyover city), as in most things design the real drivers are usually material driven, and often a byproduct of a trend. I'll sum up by saying modern interiors feel temporary, where old decor seems permanent in comparison. This leads to you feeling like a hotel guest instead of being home. You have to really work at it to make a modern interior feel like home: - Modern homes have lots of closet space and storage, so there's little need for "storage furniture like bookshelves, curios, hutches, sideboards and cabinets (you can get $5000+ china cabinets on marketplace for $200 here). When we moved in, I got rid of probably 14 pieces of (mostly beautiful) storage furniture because we just didn't need them. So it's hard to pile up the artifacts of life where they are easy to see and even grab. - Living areas are large and open,