🎪 Spaces Designed for PDA, Spy Shows, & Bad Actors

Mind your step as you enter the worlds of Hives, La Femme Nikita, Goldilocks, Scentscapes, Water Walls, Light Museums, and Paint Pales.

✏️ In Case You Missed It

Enter the World Where All Eyes Are on You

A couple weeks ago, I explored what happens to our thoughts and behaviours when we’re immersed in an environment under surveillance.

So, if you haven’t already, mind your step as you enter the world where surveillance affects your morality, personality, and peace of mind.

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🫖 Project I’ve Been Working On

Tea Wall

I never used to be a fan of public displays of affection. But a serendipitous encounter with a new love a few years ago completely shifted my perspective.

To protect his privacy, let’s call him David T.

David was absolutely delicious. He was the whole package. Beautifully gift wrapped and sorted neatly into a complex array of 36 flavours of personality. He was sweet at times, full of depth at others, and even hot and spicy when the mood was right.

Ever since we met, I’ve been declaring my deep love for him to everyone I meet.

Some people express their PDA by holding hands or locking lips. But I’m a big fan of the psycho model of showcasing my obsession with a shrine.

I call this my Tea Hive 🐝

My Tea Hive

Moral of the story, the world could always use more love, so I recommend making an effort showcase yours 💝

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🌆 Experiment I’ve Been Thinking About

TV Tours

I’ve been going on a lot of architecture tours around Toronto lately.

In one of these last ones, I was introduced to the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto.

It’s this beautiful beast of a brutalist building and for some reason it reminded me of one of my favourite shows, La Femme Nikita.

It was a Canadian spy-action-drama series, largely filmed in Toronto and Robarts got me thinking that it could be a fun personal project to rewatch the show, then track down and visit the nearby places where scenes were shot.

I first watched the show when I was in middle school and every time I see an episode nowadays, it feels nostalgic. When I went to visit the Robarts Library, it also felt weirdly nostalgic, even though I’d never been there before.

Nostalgia is one of my favourite feelings, so I often find myself thinking about ways to make the present moment feel nostalgic in the future. And this experience got me wondering, if I ever have kids, maybe it could be a worthwhile gift to spend some time with them flipping through photographs of places I think they’d enjoy visiting in the future. Then when they’re older, they’d be able to feel a comforting sense of familiarity to a bunch of places they’ve never been.

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🤥 Idea I’ve Been Thinking About

Psychology of Scale

In my superhero fantasies, I fall in love with a guy named Scopic. His powers are Ant-Man-esque, in that he has the ability to manipulate the size of anything he wants.

(I’ve still got his personality profile under construction, but I figure that he definitely went through a phase of vigilante Pinocchio-ism. Where he went around cursing a bunch of egregious liars with oversized schnozes.)

There’s a special kind of control one gets by being able to carry around a world in their pocket. And some believe that that’s the reason why we tend to love miniatures so much.

Lately, I’ve been wondering what role the scale of our surroundings plays on our psychology.

There is evidence, for example, that supports the cathedral effect.

The cathedral effect is a phenomenon that suggests working in spacious environments with high ceilings can enhance creativity.

Research by Joan Meyers-Levy, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, for instance, found that people working in rooms with higher ceilings displayed more abstract, creative thinking than those in rooms with lower ceilings.

So, I think it would be fun to see some “Goldilocks studies” on the topic. Something like, given three rooms:

a) one that makes us feel small,

b) one that makes us feel normal, and

c) one that makes us feel large…

how would each one affect our sense of power or creativity?

There’s other research out there that shows how cute things tend to make us more prosocial and attentive. So maybe our Goldilocks studies might show that Room C elicits those characteristics in us too?

Perspective is everything. So the idea that the size of our spaces could have a sizeable impact on our psychology makes me wonder, have the majority of our spaces fallen into a Goldilocks trap of making sure that everything fits us a little too perfectly?

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👁️ Research I’ve Been Thinking About

Pupillary Reactions

A topic I’ve come across a couple times lately has been “light independent pupillary reactions”.

Most of us know that our eyes dilate when we’re looking at someone we’re attracted to. Mirroring that, there’s also evidence that shows how we find people whose eyes are dilated to be more attractive.

While listening to an episode the Many Minds podcast, I also learned about studies that describe how our eyes will also dilate when we’re shown a picture of the sun. And even when imagining light or dark things. Sometimes, even while just reading the words “day” or “night”.

I love learning about environmental psychology (how our surroundings influence our mind and behaviour), but I’ve never considered how interesting environmental physiology could be (how our surroundings influence our physical body).

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💔 Reflection I’ve Been Thinking About

Love It or Hate It Design Philosophy

I don’t remember their name, but I learned recently about an architect who would believe that his work was a failure if it didn’t elicit any emotional reactions. Love it or hate it, as long as it made people feel something, then he succeeded.

As an architecture/design observer, how do you feel about that philosophy? Can you appreciate a design you hate, based on the fact that it got you to hate it?

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York City) designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. "When first unveiled, Wright received heavy criticism with critics comparing the museum to a washing machine and inverted oatmeal bowl." - Architectural Digest

Personally, I know I can have this mindset with actors who play a character I hate. Excluding the scenarios where I hate a character because I think the acting is bad, I applaud the skill of those actors who get me to loathe the character they play.

So, I think I can get there with architecture too. So long as I only consider buildings with “bad character”, as opposed to “bad skill”.

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💎 Visual I’ve Been Thinking About

Water on Walls

When I moved into my place, one of my first acts of decoration was adding sun catcher crystals to my window, so that they’d project disco rainbows all across my walls.

While it does the job on a good sunny day, watching this video from Dami Lee reminds me of the effect I’d truly love to experience.

Water refraction onto walls is like the aurora borealis in liquid form and I’m living for it!

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👃 Innovation I’ve Been Thinking About

The Smell of May vs The Smell of June

I went to visit a garden whose flowers were designed to bloom at different times of year — creating a scentscape, so that visitors would be able to distinguish whether it smells like May or June, for example.

I thought this was fascinating and I wonder what it would look like if we took more time to consider the scentscapes of the spaces we build.

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✨ Place I’ve Been Thinking About

Light Galleries

I love the idea of a light gallery.

I came across this video showcasing a lighting showroom.

And of course, my highly suggestible motivation now wants to make it his life’s mission to explore how different lighting setups can affect people within a space.

When I think about the scenes in my life where I felt a strong sense of awe, they almost all had a strong element of light:

• Watching the street lights pass by when I was a preschool passenger in my parents’ car during our cross-country drives between the US and Canada to visit family

  

• Overlooking the glistening city lights while perched above Montreal on Mount Royal at night

  

• Being immersed in the starry projections of a space documentary in a 360 degree dome planetarium

  

• The reflected lamps within Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirror room, "The Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity"

  

There are numerous studies about how light affects our mood, energy, and even our behaviour. So lately, I’ve been daydreaming about how cool it would be to have some sort of museum or gallery, whose sole purpose it was to present exhibits which illuminates the influence that light has on us.

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🎨 People I’ve Been Thinking About

Camille Walala 🔗 / Profile / 🔗 / Elle Decor /

How absolutely gorgeous and fun is this studio design!?

Taran Wilkhu

I came across it recently and I decided to dive a little deeper into its designer.

According to the about page on her website, Camille finds inspiration in the “pattern to transform atmospheres, elevate moods and spark positivity”.

That bio, alongside this picture of her

got me thinking about the power that of pops of colour can have on people.

We’ve seen it before, when I wrote about Edi Rama’s revitalization of Tirana’s cityscape in Albania and Publicolor’s Paint Club.

The Dark Side of Joyful Spaces

I love a full black fashion statement as much as the next guy, but knowing that there’s power in colour, I wonder… in a hypothetical world, where we’d each wake up into a black and white canvas, how many pales of vibrant paint would we each contribute in a lifetime?

Pleasantville (1998)

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ENJOYED THIS ISSUE?

Thanks for reading! I hope something in here inspired you, as much as it did me. If so, feel free to let me know by clicking the ❤️ button! Have a great one, Lamar ✌️😁

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