Interior design is about more than wallpaper and bean bags | Phoebe Oldrey | TEDxRoyalTunbridgeWells

[Music] one morning I woke up and thought my work is frivolous you see I'm an interior designer I just do pretty things to people's homes I don't save lives I'm not a thought leader for my generation I just know how to arrange a room beautifully but where's the longevity in that and as I stood there questioning my purpose and having what could only be described as a massive pity party I started to look for the deeper side to designing people's homes as I rolled the word home around in my mind I realized how significant they are to us we keep our loved ones safe here we hide away from the world when we need to but mostly we express ourselves here they are our Havens and we have an emotional connection to them I started to notice the trend hugar which is the Danish principle of living in harmony with your home being talked about maybe we were all looking for this emotional connection to our environment the great thing was the more I read about hugar in magazines and blogs the answer to contentment was going to be really simple apparently all I needed was a chunky knit Thro to make me happy then my inner voice spoke put the chunky knit throw down Phoebe it was time to step away from the magazines from Pinterest from Instagram the products and the trends to create rooms full of contentment I needed to empathetically look at people first only then could I design to meet their needs physically emotionally and Visually my First Step was to understand how we react to design everything that is man-made is designed from the big brro to the Chrysler Building now lots of it is good design um but I got a lot of it is bad design now the funny thing about design is you don't really notice good design you're just using it sure you notice the Aesthetics of a room it looks nice therefore I like it but you don't notice how you feel about it you just feel content think of it like having a pebble in your shoe sure you notice you have a fantastic looking pair of shoes but you don't walk down the street going gosh I'm having a great time walking in these shoes I don't have a pebble in them irritating me they're just doing their job now you're walking down the street with a pebble in your shoe and that's all you can think of it it's annoying it hurts where can I sit down and sort this out this Pebble isn't just filling your shoe it's filling your head now as well bad design is like the pebble in your shoe you notice it all the time it's irritating to squeeze round Furniture to get into a seat it's annoying to be unable to put stuff away because a cupboard is too hard to reach and it's dangerous to trip on a step that is a different height than the others in the run so how do we create good design we need to start by looking at how we function in our spaces and only then can and understanding what is the pebble to us in these spaces a few years ago UCLA decided to do just that with their life at home in the 21st century project now the thing that blew my mind was the emotional effects of clutter on people stress levels were measured and they were found to be the same as posttraumatic stress disorder to put that into context they were saying that mothers and it was mainly women who had this physical response quartero readings a mental reaction to the stuff dropped on the floor by their children was on the same level as soldiers who had firsthand experience of the traumas of War that's crazy however if we look at it this way if clutter is literally depressing then the crippling part of depression where it is hard to find motivation to tackle stuff is going to make clearing that clutter unsurmountable and just like that you're trapped in a cycle of clutter mood clutter mood clutter mood until you're emotionally drowning in your own dirty laundry now the obvious answer is throw everything out there stress-free life but life is never as simple as that we live chaotic messy lives we will always own stuff and bless them our children will just leave their stuff everywhere we can't alter our lifestyles to suit our environments it's unsustainable we need to embrace our lifestyle in our Interiors that's good design I'm not the first person to think this Margarita shuta lioki was the first woman to be allowed to study architecture in Austria in the early 20th century a few years later she was working on the Frankfurt project which involved creating affordable apartments for workingclass families she was tasked with the kitchen now the thing that I love about her design approach is that instead of improving on what was the accepted kitchen design at the time she did detailed time motion studies to determine the length of each process and she created her kitchen round these workflows the results were the invention of the first fitted kitchen it became Nick name the housewife's laboratory now the role of the kitchen over the hundred years since margarett's design has changed so much if we skip back to the UCLA study it's now got itself a new nickname the command center where instead of it being a room pushed to the back of the house where a woman would prepare and cook food for her family in private it is now become the center of the home with not only food prepared here but life lived here they've become huge status symbols and demand the largest footprint in our home but how do we emotionally cope with all this space I call this the Goldilocks analogy what if a space is too big open plan offices have come under the microscope for their detrimental effect on people's Health on a basic level we get sick more often because exposed to more germs handing round colds like candy but it is the openness of the space that is rubbing people up the wrong way though the open plan office was designed to mean more human interaction between work colleagues it's actually starting to isolate them as the noise annoyance of people talking and phones ringing and the tap tap tapping of typing is pushing people to plug in their headphones and close down their world to a very small box that is just them and their computer they have become the Machinery running the office and that human interaction these spaces were designed to encourage isn't happening anymore this has led to a high rate of depression in office workers another large space that isn't as harmonious as we'd like is the command center kitchen yet again noise is an issue with tiny Acoustics bouncing off hard surfaces also with people culminating here so is their stuff creating clutter but it is our human nature that is becoming unsettled as these spaces become expansive if we look to our basic animal instinct to survive in the wild we don't look to eat in the exposed part of the Woodland it makes us vulnerable and more at risk of being eaten by a bear our ingrained instinct play a lot with how we settle into a space and without creating a feeling of protection where we eat we become unnerved this makes Goldilocks Mumble this space is too large but whatever a space is too small the changing room is the most powerful room in retail according to Envision retail 71% of those who try stuff on go on to buy but how do we feel about these little space the changing room splits into two categories there is the luxury changing room with the expensive goodies which is comfortable and accommodating we feel good about ourselves in these spaces so trying on clothes is a pleasure the cheaper fashion chains have a very different feel to them with cues claustrophobic spaces and lighting that makes you look like KN of the Living Dead we make a quick choice about our cheap item it's about churn and it's created a phenomenon psychologists call changing room rage where we feel low about ourselves even taking that feeling of low self-worth home this makes Goldilocks yell this space is too small design is about working with the space that we have there is a balance to be made between the claustrophobic and the exposed and it's a balance of creating a feeling of space in small areas and creating intimate zones in big areas and just like Goldilocks we take the pebble from our shoe and we say this feels just right as interior designers we have the tools from layout to lighting to resolve all of these issues and create calming spaces suddenly I'm not feeling so frivolous nothing better demonstrates this than this story about color prisons and suicide on average a prisoner dies by suicide every 3 days a majority of those attempts will happen on an inmates first night in prison a few years ago the prison service decided to question if the environments they were placing these people into was harming them they brought on board color psychologist Professor Hillary dolk it was her story of the showers that demonstrates the powerful effect of color these showers were Stark cubicles with 20 by 20 gloss white tiles but these showers weren't just showers they were a Gateway from civilian life to prison life think what that must be like for one moment you've left your family behind your life behind and as you step into that shower you've even left your own clothes behind the last shred of your own identity you were surrounded by a stark clinical space and you are frightened by what you're about to step into the damage the prison service was seeing done to those showers was enormous with smashed broken tiles and fittings now with smashed tiles doesn't just come the damage to the prison but you now have someone who is created their own weapon how do you resolve something like that they changed the tiles to pale terracotta the pale terracotta showers created an environment that was not as upsetting in the prisons this was implemented the showers weren't damaged the suicide rate was lowered now it's fair to say when you're standing with your paint chart in your hand question ing what color you're going to do the lounge it is unlikely you're thinking H French gray I wonder if that's going to make me feel clinically depressed but you will Peg an emotional response to the colors you're repelled by and Drawn to I know a woman who cannot coope with Grays and Interiors since moving from the US it is the loss of the sparkle in the American sky that makes her in exchange for our dirty gray skies that makes her melancholy the idea of putting that gray sky on her wall fills her with horror and no matter how trendy gray is she will never feel comfortable on an emotional level in that room now I've talked about the physical and I've talked about the emotional but what about the visual side of interior design if we create spaces that only meet our needs in an analytical way then they will be soulless there is an artistry to doing pretty things to a home that is also a healing thing however we have become obsessed with the visual side only consuming interior design via 2D images from magazines and social media and I worry that we don't really know what we're looking at when we look at a photo we only see the results of someone else's design Journey we see a picture of Google's new office and we go ah cool they have a robo we should get a robo then we will be as cool as Google but it's not about the robo Google are using the design of their New London office to fight for the top Tech brains in Britain the robo is the finishing touch of their design Journey that says we welcome people who think outside the box to our workplace if you copy the robot without understanding that then you're just going to end up with a rowo in the middle of your office with workers refusing to get in because they feel stupid for doing so if we make design only about the visual wow factor and don't take our own journey to get there we are missing the amazing opportunity to create groundbreaking design of our very own so let's go back to the moment I'm clutching my chunky net throw feeling frivolous and asking about the longevity of my life's work but it's not about my work it's about the people cocooned in my work and their experience of living in it with a holistic approach we can create spaces that meet our needs physically emotionally and Visually and I passionately believe that not only good design exists here but great design and like not having a pebble in your shoe you might not even notice you will just feel at peace thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 143,530

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Design, Architecture, Art

Id: 2T9kjujUMhs

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2017