Medici Design Group . . .
by
Marie Minnich, Allied ASID
"The Art of Inhabitation"
“We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of
The wheel depends.
We turn clay to make a vessel;
But it is on the upper space where there is nothing that the utility of
The vessel depends.
We pierce doors and windows to make a house;
And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the utility of
The house depends.
Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize
The utility of what is not.”
“Mind experience is a living thing that colors our existence with subjective perceptions and influences every aspect of our physical life and well-being”-
Marie Minnich, September 2007
“Psychological aspects of interior design are based on the emotional narrative of the people involved interacting with the built environment. I believe that all interior design is part of the human biological and/or emotional endeavor and experience to protect the body from harm cradle to grave. The body is temporary, therefore all interior design is a temporal concern, but can also be understood psychologically.”
Marie Minnich, September 2007
Definition of Interior Design:
Interior decoration
n.
The planning and execution of the layout, decoration, and furnishing of an architectural interior. Also called interior design.
interior decorator n.
Sigmund Freud Selected Writings, Introduction by Robert Coles, From” Civilization and its Discontents”
Selected Writings, Carl Gustav Jung; Princeton University Press and Random House, copyright 1997
Self and Society, A Symbolic Interactionist Social Psychology, by John P. Hewitt
The Interior Design Reference Manual by David K. Kallast, A.I.A
The I Ching or Book of Changes, The Richard Wilhelm Translation, foreword by C. G. Jung.
Color for Interior Design, Ethel Rompilla, New York School of Interior Design
Architectural Lighting Design, second edition, by Gary Steffy,
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, A Theory of Human Motivation, 1943
I. Psychology of Civilization
Sigmund Freud Selected Writings, Introduction by Robert Coles, From ” Civilization and its Discontents by Sigmund Freud ”, 1930; .W. Norton & Company; 1997
Today we know Freud as the founder of psychoanalysis, which is a means of exploring our mental life, a body of knowledge and ideas about that life, and a kind of treatment that certain psychiatrists and psychologists offer those who find themselves in emotional difficulty.
Freudian theory, a theory of psychology, divides the personality into three distinct parts, these parts being the Id, the Ego, and the Superego. I understand the Id to be the innate biological imperatives of the personality, the Superego to be the cultural norms that the personality has integrated into itself, and the Ego to be the part of the personality that negotiates between the Id and the Superego. According to Freud, the Id and the Superego are basically at war with one another, and this results in all sorts of neuroses and psychoses to the Ego as it attempts to resolve these conflicts.
In his discourse on “Civilization and its Discontents”, Freud states…”We shall therefore content ourselves with saying once more that the word ‘civilization’ describes the whole sum of the achievements and regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serves two purposes-namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations.”
Freud also makes distinctions concerning the rights of the group and the rights of the individual. It is only when the rights of the group become stronger than the rights of the individual that we gain civilization-otherwise it is the rule of brute force and of the strength of one individual overpowering another. He says “Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals…This replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of civilization.”
Freud also makes a case for beauty as a psychological need in this discourse. He makes a case that beauty, cleanliness and order obviously occupy a special position among the requirements of civilization. “No one will maintain that they are as important for life as control over the forces of nature or as some other factors with which we shall become acquainted. And yet no one would care to put them in the background as trivialities…no feature, however, seems better to characterize civilization than its esteem and encouragement of man’s higher mental activities-his intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements-and the leading role that it assigns to ideas in human life.”
Later we will see that this is important towards a psychology of interior design.
Selected Writings, Carl Gustav Jung; Princeton University Press and Random House, copyright 1997
Carl Jung (1875-1961) was Freud’s greatest student and colleague, and stood out for his powerful intellectual presence and clinical, exploratory mind. Later he split with Freud on some key tenets of psychoanalysis. His explorations of the unconscious, however, are filled with metaphor and symbology. Jung’s unconscious is charged with metaphysical meaning, intent on comprehending this world, fathoming its mysteries, and linked in ways still hard to explain precisely to history, biology and genetics.
Jung contended that one of the basic principles of analytical psychology is that dream-images are to be understood symbolically. Further he delves deeply into the world of appearances as opposed to the unseen underlying principles of everything. He also unfurls deep metaphorical meanings in the seen world, even going so far as to postulate that the entire seen world is metaphor for deeper meanings of the psyche.
The reason I include Carl Jung towards a psychology of interior design is that I do not believe that one can design only from a rational, scientific point of view. The built world is mathematical and temporal, that is true. But the built environment cannot be understood only from a behavioral and cognitive point of view; the emotional and mental skills needed to find interior solutions exceed knowing simple construction methods. Interior design in fact does require an understanding of the human psyche and of the metaphors of the built environment. The act of inhabiting is an actual human experience, as is the act of dwelling. I believe that a priori human motivations that come from deep in the psyche can and do influence our choices in design. Understanding the theory of collective consciousness of Carl Jung helps to understand the metaphorical power of all the other attributes in design, from color to sound to environment.
In this book, the author provides definitions of psychology, social psychology, Freudian theory, and the thesis of the book, symbolic interactionism.
The author provides a working definition of both psychology and social psychology: “Psychologists do not deny that social and cultural forces shape the environment within such basic psychological process as learning, cognition, or emotion take place. But their main interest is in the processes themselves rather than in their social setting. As a result, psychologists make the individual their main unit of analysis. Sociologists, on the other hand, seek to describe and explain patterns of conduct among larger aggregates of people- groups, communities, social classes, and even whole societies. Without denying the importance of the mind, or of processes that operate at the individual level, sociological social psychologists give priority to human association and make society the beginning point of their analysis.”
He also compares Freudian theory with Symbolic Interactionism. In Freudian theory, which concentrates on the motivations of the individual (and which later Maslow expounded into his theory of motivation) less credence is given to sociological concerns.
The Symbolic interactionists take a different approach. Rather than explaining what people do on the basis of assumptions about their individual motives, it examines what people SAY about their motives and looks at the real contexts of interaction in which people actually FORM their conduct. Instead of assuming that behavior is propelled by a single set of meanings, symbolic interactionists study the meanings people construct as they go about their affairs. Their focus is on the observation of people as they construct their conduct rather than on a priori assumptions about motivation.
This theory of social psychology might seem to be more in line with understanding how human beings relate to their built environment and to each other, so I see it as being a possible preliminary useful psychological model towards a psychology of interior design. The psychological aspects in the field of interior design are necessarily based on the observance of human behavior and of human beings as they construct their environment and relate to it; and of listening to what people say about their environment- e.g., symbolic interaction.
To reiterate for purposes of this paper then, psychology is deemed to be the study of internal behaviors, thoughts and processes of the individual and how the individual relates to the world, and sociology is deemed to be the behaviors, thoughts and processes of how two or more individuals relate to the world and each other. Jung focused on the metaphors of symbols and dreams and believed in a collective unconscious for mankind. The focus of Symbolic Interactionism is an observance of human beings as they construct their environment, but not on assumptions about motivations, as per for example Maslow. All psychological models should be considered towards a psychology of interior design.
The Interior Design Reference Manual by David K. Kallast, A.I.A, 1992
The author discusses five principal psychological aspects in the field of interior design as defined in The Interior Design Reference. These aspects are defined as follows:
A behavior setting is a particular place with definable boundaries and objects in which a standing pattern of behavior occurs at a particular time.
Territoriality is a fundamental aspect of human behavior and refers to the need to lay claim to the spaces we occupy and the things we own.
One of the ways territoriality manifests itself is with the personalization of space. Proxemics is how the theory of personal space is applied to the use of space.
To a certain extent, the environment can either facilitate or hinder human interaction. For example, seating arrangement is one of the most common ways of facilitating group interaction.
The physical environment holds much symbolism for some human beings. Environment can communicate status.
The author of this interior design study manual doesn’t differentiate between different psychological models for his definitions of psychological aspects of interior design, His definitions seem to be based on theories of human cognitive behavior, but not underlying motivational needs.
The authors’ defined attributes attempt a psychology of interior design, but I find the lack of consistency in a psychological model confusing. The definitions are partly behavioral, partly symbolic interactionist, and partly motivational. This is why I feel that we need to move towards a theory of psychology of interior design that is based on a consistent psychological model.
To continue, the author also states from The Interior Design Reference Manual: “A well designed interior should respond to the psychological and social needs of the people using it as well as to their physical needs.” The author’s definition is a very mundane definition of an interior designers function that removes aesthetics from the equation. There is no reference to beauty and aesthetics, which Freud in his discourse on “Civilization and its discontents” says is integral to civilization (and which Maslow also defines a “meta need” in his theory of motivation).
The I Ching or Book of Changes, The Richard Wilhelm Translation, foreword by C. G. Jung.
Balance, harmony and scale in interior design cannot be executed without basic psychological understanding of line and form and associative symbolism.
Form can have powerful symbolic and emotional qualities. In classical Mythology, the sphere relates to the heavens, sun and planet. The cube is a metaphor for earth.
“The symbol of heaven is the circle, and that of earth is the square. Thus squareness is a primary quality of the earth. On the other hand, movement in a straight line, as well as magnitude, is a primary quality of the Creative. But all square things have their origin in a straight line and in turn form solid bodies …”
The I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of divination, uses a series of hexagrams made of horizontal lines for divination. Unbroken lines stand for primal power, which is light giving, active, strong and of the spirit. Unbroken lines represent heaven. Hexagrams made of broken lines represent the dark, yielding, and receptive primal power of yin. Broken lines represent earth. Additionally, in I Ching, two unbroken horizontal lines signify “Yes”, and two horizontal broken lines signify “No”. How primal is the psychological and symbolic significance of line and form! Carl Jung would say these primal symbols are part of the “collective consciousness of humankind.”
Circle, Square, Triangle. Sphere, Cube, Cone. These are the basic geometric building blocks of all creation. These are the forms we look for and seek to distinguish through vision. Forms are usually viewed in relation to other forms, as the Cubists so aptly demonstrated.
“A Line is an object or form whose actual or visual length greatly exceeds any actual width or depth it may have. Lines have a very strong directional sense and can affect a person’s feeling about a space. Form is the basic shape and configuration of an object or space. It is often the way we first distinguish one thing as being different from another.”
Horizontal lines and forms (more length than width than depth) are generally perceived as restful and stable. Vertical forms (more height than width and depth) are usually perceived as having strength. Spheres relate more to the natural world and the human body. Cubes are also perceived as having stability.
As applied to psychology of interior design, vertical lines in interior design tend to make a space appear higher than it is. Horizontal lines lower the apparent height of a space. Diagonal lines can create an imbalance in space.
One constant throughout history has been the human need for not only color but also change and variety. We are now, as ever, adapting to change and new technologies, but beauty is still a highly valued pursuit, and color will always play a vital role. Color should not be approached superficially. Color is a matter of the utmost psychological urgency.
The ancient Greeks realized that color and music could be organized along mathematical scales. Ancient civilizations ascribed color to the planets as well as to the elements and direction of the compass. The Greeks recognized the four elements of matter to be earth, air, fire and water, symbolized by green, yellow, red and blue.
Radiant energy on the visible wavelength makes up the colors that we can perceive, from ultraviolet to red. There are different color models that the interior designer can turn to, such as Munsell. But science cannot explain the deep psychological impact of color on individuals, and the strong emotions that color can generate.
Color symbolism was prominent in the Bible and early Christianity; red stood for compassion or martyrdom, blue for divinity, white for purity and joy, green for immortality, yellow or gold for celestial glory, and purple for sorrow. The trinity of father, son and Holy Ghost was represented by blue, yellow, and red. The brilliance of a color was important, as in Ezekiel’s comparison of the throne of God to the color of a blue sapphire.
The artist and philosopher see color in another dimension entirely. Playwrights use color terms to evoke feeling, as Shakespeare did in Twelfth Night in Viola’s reference to a “green and yellow melancholy”.
Color perception changes the way we perceive the built environments. Cool colors appear to recede, and warm colors appear to advance. Additionally, the way colors adjacent to each other change the appearance of floors and walls is a proven fact.
The psychology of color is extremely complex. It impacts form, scale, and perception of architectural elements. In creating a color scheme, the proportion of each color is also extremely important. Color also has deep status connotations. Certain pigments used to be very rare and hard to come by, such as ultramarine. Therefore, only nobility could afford the rich, saturated colors for their dwellings and palaces, while peasants had to make do with a plain, inexpensive “whitewash”. To this day, I believe this trend is still extant in the middle class as evidenced in the stark white walls of many apartment homes. Even now, it takes far more money and time to have dark colors done well on walls, and dark colors are found more prevalently in upper-class homes than working class homes.
“The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends. And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows – it has nothing else.”
Architecture developed as it did because of climatic conditions and the nature of available building materials. The life giving attributes of the sun have been worshiped since pre-history, as in the ancient Egyptians worshipping the sun god, Ra. The psychological attributes of light and dark are as primal as the attributes of line and form, and precede any dialogue on lighting. “The sun never knew how wonderful it was,” the architect Louis Kahn said, “Until it fell on the wall of a building”. The act of inhabitation is co-created with the sun, daylight and dusk and nightfall. Contemporary environmentally responsible design is certainly based on climate concerns, sun and water, and the quality thereof.
In Praise of Shadows is actually written by a Japanese novelist, but his essay touches deeply on the psychology of light and dark. He writes in the context of traditional Japanese architecture and dwellings, but makes the point that it is the very nature of the daylight in Japan, and traditionally the candlelight at night, that created dwellings that seem austere to the Western eye, but to the Japanese aesthetic were a rich environment in light and dark. Contemporary environmentally responsible design could certainly learn from the psychology of this aesthetic of concentration on light and shadow, as opposed to the Western “overly built” environment. The psychology of light and dark is so primal to dwellings and how humans inhabit their environment. I believe that lighting design begins to touch on these elements, but it could be much more developed towards a psychology of interior design.
Architectural Lighting Design, second edition, by Gary Steffy,
Dramatic lighting effects are used in stage, theatre, and of course magnificent commercial public enterprises such as casinos of hotels. In residential interior design, lighting is often more of an afterthought than a well thought out plan integral to the design of the home.
Scientific explanations and technical specifications abound of light, but do not necessarily illuminate the psychology of lighting. Typically however, lighting designers acknowledge psychology of lighting, as in differentiating between mood lighting, accent lighting, and task lighting.
The way in which an environment is presented to its users is at least partly responsible for the way in which they perceive and react to it; thus, lighting can play a significant role in people’s psychological and physiological responses to an environment. The distribution of luminances in a space can influence perceptions of the space’s intended functions, level of comfort, and apparent spatial volume.
Flynn and colleagues conclude that the experience of lighted spaces is, at least to some extent, a shared experience.
The above explanations address physical realities and perceptions, but do not cohesively address psychological being. In other words, how are our internal mental processes affected by environmental lighting? How does environmental lighting shape cognitive behavior? It is useful to differentiate mood lighting, accent lighting, and task lighting, but just exactly why does lighting psychologically alter our mood?
Circadian rhythms refer to the biological cycle of plants and animals. Doses of daylight or daylight-like intensities (thousands of lux) during the waking hours are important to setting or adjusting the circadian rhythms. Similarly, the absence of light (total darkness) during sleeping hours is important. This is biological. Psychology, however, depends on the observer, depends on the luminance location, depends on luminance distribution, and depends on luminance intensities.
For purposes of this paper, however, I think I would summarize the psychology of light in a simple imperative; Need for light, which would actually be a subset in one of the other primary aspects of psychology of interior design such as need for control over environment, which might be a subset of Maslow’s hierarchy as a psychological model.
IX. The Psychology of Textiles/Furnishings
In this day and age of technical knowledge and morphing interior designers into construction technicians, do textiles have any more psychological meaning than just being flammable or inflammable? I believe textiles are a form of embodied energy with deep psychological, sociological and environmental connotations. I am particularly interested in the evolution of silk as a metaphor for luxury and femininity. Textiles become a metaphor for not only function, but also luxury and status and other psychological needs.
The progress of art and culture was always from the East and moved slowly. The first silk looms were set up in the royal palaces of the Roman kings in the year 533 A.D. The raw material was brought from the East for a long time but in the sixth century two Greek monks, while in China, studied the method of rearing silk worms and obtaining the silk, and on their departure are said to have concealed the eggs of silk worms in their staves. They are accredited with introducing the manufacture of silk into Greece and hence into Western Europe. After that Greece, Persia and Asia Minor made this material, and Byzantium was famed for its silks.
The earliest garments of Egypt were of cotton and hemp, or mallow, resembling flax. The older Egyptians never knew silks in any form, nor did the Israelites, nor any of the ancients. The earliest account of this material is given by Aristotle (fourth century). It was brought into Western Europe from China, via India, the Red Sea and Persia, and the first to weave it outside the Orient was a maiden on the Isle of Coos, off the coast of Asia Minor, producing a thin gauze-like tissue worn by herself and companions. To-day those tiny bits of gauze one sees laid in between the leaves of old manuscript to protect the illuminations, as our publishers use sheets of tissue paper, are said to be examples of this earliest form of woven silk.
The Romans used silk at first only for their women, as it was considered not a masculine material, but gradually they adopted it for the festival robes of men.
In the eleventh century Italy manufactured her own silks, and into them were woven precious stones, corals, seed pearls and colored glass beads that were made in Greece and Venice, as well as gold and silver spangles (twelfth and thirteenth centuries).
We know that England was weaving silk in the thirteenth century, and velvets seem to have been used at a very early date. The introduction of silk and velvet into different countries had an immediate and much-needed influence in civilizing the manners of society.
Touch is how the fabric feels to a person’s skin. Smooth fabrics like silk have a luxurious feel that connote comfort, luxury and nobility, while as durability might relate more to coarse, textured surfaces. As a metaphor, silk relates to higher and more ephemeral thought.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs from A Theory of Human Motivation, 1943
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a famous psychological theory published by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow. (Ref: A Theory of Human Motivation, 1943) Maslow created a psychosocial model of human development that establishes a hierarchy of human motivational needs, and finds we are first motivated by our basic biological needs. It is only as each level of need is met that the finer and more ephemeral aspects of the human condition can be actualized.
I absorb a lot from Maslow’s theory of motivation, and I agree that basic physiological needs have to be met before an individual can consider higher things. Then I believe that his theory of defined Meta needs which include truth, justice and beauty really encompass the reality of what a psychology of interior design needs to incorporate.
The built environment provides at a minimum basic shelter, which in turn provides for our physical needs at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy. But enhanced interior design begins to actualize our higher needs.
I am therefore prone to base a psychology of interior design on a motivational and symbolic model beginning with Freud and Jung, and continuing with Maslow, and feel that behavior follows emotional motivation. Thus interior design reflects emotional states of motivation.
Conclusion
So I summarize the following motivational psychological needs in interior design: The overwhelming human need to inhabit is the a priori motivation that supercedes all other motivation. Subsets of that need are:
I believe these are the dominant psychological/sociocultural attributes and motivations of all human beings, which I then apply to the field of interior design as experiential imperatives.
I believe these are universal psychological imperatives for individuals that cut across all cultures from primitive to ancient to modern. As far as I am concerned, whether finding a design solution for a maximum-security prison, or a luxury hotel, these universal human motivational psychological attributes should have equal weight for the end goal-humane, beautiful and supremely livable environments that promote the well being of the individual, the group, and society.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Sigmund Freud Selected Writings, Introduction by Robert Coles, From ” Civilization and its Discontents by Sigmund Freud ”, 1930; .W. Norton & Company; 1997; p. 430
Selected Writings, Carl Gustav Jung; Princeton University Press and Random House, copyright 1997, from the Introduction by Robert Coles, p. x
Self and Society, A Symbolic Interactionist Social Psychology, by John P. Hewitt, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Allyn and Bacon, Copyright @2000, Needham Heights, MA
Interior Design Reference Manual, David K. Kallast, A.I.A., copyright 1992 by Professional Publications, Inc., Belmont, CA.
Interior Design Reference Manual, David K. Kallast, A.I.A., copyright 1992 by Professional Publications, Inc., Belmont, CA. pp. 28-43
The I Ching or Book of Changes, The Richard Wilhelm Translation, foreword by C. G. Jung. Bollingen Series XIX; Princeton University Press, copyright 1950.
Interior Design Reference Manual, David K. Kallast, A.I.A., copyright 1992 by Professional Publications, Inc., Belmont, CA. p. 1
Color for Interior Design, Ethel Rompilla, New York School of Interior Design, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York, 2005
In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki, English translation, Foreword and Afterward copyright 1977; Leete’s island Books, Inc., Stony Creek, CT.
Architectural Lighting Design by Gary Steffy, Second Edition, John Wiley& Sons, inc., copyright 2002
IBID, from the author’s footnote: John E. Flynn, et al., “Interim Study of Procedures for Investigating the Effect of Light on Impression and Behavior,” Journal of the Illuminating Engineering Society, 1973, no. 3:94