It’s been a while since I have put up a ‘Ask me’ thread so I figured I have another go. I’m off for the week so I have some time.
My credentials: I’m a teacher of psychology with a consentration in Environmental Psychology: The study of humans with-in their environments. I have a small consulting business on the side where I consult on everything from corporate set-up and design (making cube life more liveable, and more productive) to consulting in hospitals (making way-finding easier, and color choice more pleasant) to private consultations on kids spaces and adult living areas.
My most recent project is consulting at a large design firm in Rhode Island, making nodal areas for workers on break and during lunch…they had the bland institutional look going against them…now they have the brick and stone floors, and curving less angular walkways and pathways making everything look a little more fun…
So, do you havea room or office that needs a little help, or a design idea that is with-in your budget. Let me know it’s free
Such as myself? Sure, organize the chaos but don’t organize it too much where you become disinterested.
Practice Biophilia: bringing natural objects into unnatural environs. Or the humans propensity to affiliate with other life forms.
If you like green things, fill your space with plants, this will not only improve the production of oxygen (tho you won’'t sense it as it is so minute) it will aid in knowing you must take care of them to help them survive, and there is a bit of psychological merit in that.
Those of us with ADD like to look out the windows, we like to get distracted, we can’t stand monotony in some forms. So we deal with each one of those in turn.
The problem is, those of us with ADD have formed habits, and those are hard to break. Designing an environment around you to help you break bad habits is truly the only way to find help.
If you could be more specific on a particular room or area I could get a bit more specific.
How do you combat peripheral-vision distraction? This comes up often at our workplace. If you sit on a main walkway, you always see people walking by out of the corner of your eye. It becomes very distracting. Most of the cubes on the main walkway are empty because of this. It is a tremendous waste of space.
How do you encourage social interaction in public space while discouraging it in private space? I like talking to my co-workers, but not when I’m at my desk concentrating on something.
What negative behaviors can you easily predict simply by walking into a place for the first time? What are the behaviors and causes?
Let’s work in reverse if you don’t mind. Do we use sound. yes, Yes, and YES!!! I have been advocating the sleepmate white noise machines for 20 years. These are the machines that you would see in counseling offices and doctor’s offices. They are based on the premise that the frequency and pitch of there machines nearly 100% drown out outside noice, even in an open office setting. They are great if people are talking on the phone alot, it aides in masking the conversations.
Double and tripled up cubes that are lacking sufficient personal space are the bane of every cube worker in America. Cube design where the management dictates what you can and can not put in your own cube. To an extent this is a good rule, no playboy calender’s etc…etc… But when management say’s no plants or personal objects…that is when I would step in and say, “this policy needs to be changed,” This can significantly reduce productivity in a office setting.
Causes of behaviours tend to lay in the amount of control they have with in their own little environment (cube/office) Are tehy shackled heel and wrist? Or do they have the right amount of autonomy to help them be at peak production for a given job.
This is usually done in the initial consultation with the client, i.e. when I sit down with them and understand what they are looking for. Encouraging social interaction - keep the lunching areas out of earshot of work/production areas. Have management be as clear as possible without being overbearing, on the policies for level of conversation and noises for a group of offices or cubes.
If you work in a sea of cubes, this can be difficult to over come. Sound machines help…and should be placed ‘on’ before people arrive, and 9 times out of 10 people with-in ear shot of the machine will not even notice it.
If you do not want your back to the walkway…this can be a difficult obstacle to overcome. What I have seen are cube doors, consisting of a cloth door…solomon’s sells them I believe, or placing a filing cabinet in the door way with just enough room to get by. If you are severely limited in your moveability with-in your cube then this can be a problem. If not try asking to elongate your cube so You sit facing the opposing corner, whiling maintaining your back is not to the cube entrance…if you really want to avoid that…
(Real) Thin Brick Veneer: These ain’t your grandma’s Z-brick. One of many companies out there BVI.
(Natural) Thin Stone Veneer: Material $14-$15 [/]. [Robinson Rock Brand Dist. By Rolling Rock.
(Cultured/Man Made) Stone Veneer: Material $5-7 [/]. The 2 best are: [url=http://www.thin-brick-veneer.com/thin-brick-veneer.html]Eldorado on the Eastcoast](http://www.rollrock.com/ThinVeneer/ThinVeneer.htm), Cultured Stone out West.
My husband and I are biophilics (??) who are currently being crowded out of our house by our plants !
We recently moved into a pretty small one-bedroom apt. The living room has a big bay window (facing north, boo) which we have filled with plants, on a few end tables and a shelf supported by two tall (and very old, pillaged-from-the-trash) speakers.
Now we have the problem that (a) there’s no room for furniture because the tables the plants are on take up so much space, and (b) there’s no place to put a drink because all the table space is filled up with plants !
(There’s a big chauffleura that won’t really fit anywhere else, and the sun makes it sooo happy … and we have three hanging ones in the windows which also love the light; everything else could probably be moved if necessary).
So, any cheap, innovative ideas about where to put the plants in a light-limited apartment? Can we hang them from the ceiling with regular hooks, or do they need extra supports?
It would seem your problem lay in the size of the appartment. I would go buy $2 hanging ropes (you know the ones that go under the pots) and place 3/4 of the plants up around the room. The ones that require medium to low light. Buy some 97¢ walmart hooks and screw them into the studs…make sure they are in studs…otherwise the larger plants would break teh sheet rock.
Now for the layout, take what furnature you have and create little nodal areas…like if you have a futon or couch place it across the room to separate out that area. then maybe a small table can be placed in front of it for … without seeing it…it’s difficult. What furniture do you have?
I know what you mean. I can’t think of how to describe it. Plus I have no sense of how big things are …
The room is maybe 10’ x 15’. We have a two-seater couch, a chair, a desk with a computer, and numerous random small tables. A three-seater couch would take up the entire room, so we’re kind of limited. One wall is the window, which has three sides (you know what I mean, right?), one wall currently has the two-seater and a painting, the opposite wall has a big radiator (so we shouldn’t - should we? - put a sofa in front of it; I was thinking of a beanbag or some huge cushions), and the fourth wall (opposite the window) has a massive opening into the kitchen.
It’s already in nodal areas - the kitchen and living room together are smaller than the kitchen of the place we moved out of ! We were joking last night about the kitchen, corridor, dual-purpose dining room, and living room - all of which are really one big room with a few strategically-placed bits of walls (and the largest fridge I have ever seen, it came with the place).
I guess I just need to hang them all up, but I’d love any other small-space suggestions you have.
Well cowgirl - the key to small space living is Hide Everything. For instance, pack and stow all outof season clothes, use trunk style end tables and coffee tables to stow things you need on an everyday basis. Towels etc…etc… And if you can try to match the furniture color with the wall color as best you can, this will make the room seem larger. This can be done easily with throw blanket’s pillows, sheets etc…etc…
I’m in a little rush…so I’ll write more when I return
My wife has trouble seeing in the dark. Especially when its overcast, theres no moon, all the lights in the house are off and she has to go pee-pee.
How would one re-arrange furniture in the house to minimize trips to the emergency room without making it look like there is a runway between the bedroom and the bathroom?
Specially concerning is the placement of thin wooden angular-cut support legs that so much of todays furniture seems to be equiped with.
I`m getting sick and tired of broken toes. One had to be re-attached.
The bathroom lies off the kitchen so she must traverse the entire living room and the dinette area to complete the trip. Often this entails tackling a bar stool and or tripping over the cat. Midnight calls to the vet arent cheap either.
Have you considered getting her a little flashlight to use for nighttime navigation? A single-LED light would give enough light to navigate while not being painfully blinding.
Hunter Hawk, that little LED would get lost four times a day just like the car keys, the purse, the glasses, the phone, the remote, etc. No go. gotpasswords, night lights use electricity, wife thinks our bill is already way too high.
My hell hole…oops, office at work is about 12 x 10 and is grey, grey, grey. Grey walls, grey carpet, grey file cabinet and grey desk. Two sets of florescent lights are over head, and there is one door, no windows (although I could see a window if I stood in the doorway and looked across the room. I sit in front of a computer all day, and am the only one in my office (although there is a spare desk identical to mine–grey also–on the other side of my office.
I’m good with plants at home, but because of the lack of sunlight, I’m not sure how well they’d do in my office (especially on the weekends when the door is shut and it’s dark as sin). I’ve hung some pictures which I really like on the walls, but it’s still deeply depressing. I’m positive that the building itself won’t let me paint the walls, although they don’t seems to have a problem with us hanging anything on the walls. I’m open to any suggestions.
Phallo - light green, light pink, and grey are “calming” colors. Yeah sure…and if you buy that I have a levitation machine I can sell you for really cheap
The whole reason my profession came about, is because of misconceptions in design like stated above. (that is a gross over simplification but you get my point) Color…is everything. Seriously, it can mean the difference between a productive group and a gaggle of zombies.
My suggestion to you will cost you roughly $7 at any stationary store. You do not have to paint your walls, but what you can do is go get some 24" X 36" colored construction paper and put it up on your walls in varying arrangments. Plants will do fine in the flourescent light. Actually, they will do better in that light than pure sunlight because the flourescent light is full spectrum. So bring the plants on in.
As for the colors of the construction paper and the basic set up…play around with it. Make it just the way you want it. Trust me, as soon as you put it up, when someone enter’s your office that is the first thing hey will comment on…I recommend primary colors, Blue Red Green Yellow…but you can put anything up you want. Even place the pictures you have on top of the colored paper. One more thing I can suggest and this is slightly funky but works wonders for eliminating grey yuck…is get a full length mirror from walmart…$5-7…and place it horizontally roughly 48 inches off the ground…this will expand the dinension of your space…and when people see it, it will be reflecting space and not faces…thus giving the illusion of expansion…
Good Luck
And for the Guy who has a wife with frequent nocturnal micturition: get the night lights…they use around 3 cent’s of power a month. Seriously…place the couch directly in her way. If the living room can be laid out that way…it is the best way to help with broken toes. Place the couch perpendicular to the wall, so when your wife goes to the bathroom she finds the fluffy back of the couch and not the hard wood of a coffee table…that way she can keep her hands on the couch and walk her way around it…and pick a point at the end to walk to where she knows she will not stub a digit.
Thanks for the tips, Phl, you’ve inspired me to rearrange everything this weekend ! Hopefully I can create enough room for more comfy furniture, and I’ll hide everything I can …
I’m also curious as to what you make of Feng Shui.
Well, naturally I like Feng Shui. Some of the spiritual hub-bub is a little out there but all in all we (the feng shui gods and I) are out for the same things. I make spaces more psychologically comforting, and feng shui makes sure your mind body and spirit are all in sync. I do not use a compass directly in my practice, but indirectly I do use the poistion of the sun. I had a thread a while back that dealt with a patio I am designing for a Long Island gentleman where at any time of the sun-lit day you can see what time it is, and month by looking at the shadows on the floor. Very fun project…and a first for me.
Feng Shui harmonizes the CHI with-in us all. Having taken been an avid supporter of Chi Qong and practitioner of the art of movement taught there-in I must say feng shui is “right” for some people.
However, I practice in a world where feng shui can not be practically used in most settings. For instance, the office worker who’s desk is bolted to the floor and who is in an 8x8 cube…sorry, but placing your computer table south-southwest is not an option. So I save the spiritual aspects of feng shui for those private jobs where it can be practically utilized.
As for your appartment…good luck, and remember to find those studs for the heavier plants.
