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: 204

# Comments: 209

Hacker News 讨论

204 points · 210 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.
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.
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
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
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.
Al-Khwarizmi
I don't really know what to take away from this piece. I think I might be misunderstanding something. On the one hand, "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" - What, isn't it just the opposite? Coastlines and many plants are famously fractal, and in general, if you zoom into nature you will see a lot of detail, while in artificial objects you will often see a uniform sufrace. On the other hand, "Repetitive grids, stark contrasts, and uniform surfaces have replaced the organic variation of earlier styles" - Okay, I get that grids are bad, but if the problem is too much detail and visual stimulation, why are uniform sources a problem? Is high complexity good or bad? The on
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.
Alien1Being
"Modern decor" is different from contemporary decor. For instance actual lighting designers look with contempt at the kind of lighting mentioned in the article as a 1970's trend, that was in turn influenced by the 1930's Bauhaus. Modern lighting uses layered lighting to create a cozy ambience and human friendly small pools of warm illumination. See : https://talalighting.com/blogs/journal/how-to-layer-light-in...