the colour of north street

If you take the words and the branding out of the hight street is it less demanding? Might this be the same for people who speak another language or cannot read? Are we so familiar with the brands we can tell what they are just by the colour combinations?

words on north street

High streets bombard us with information. A combination of stimuli: verbal, colour, branding. Naturally, we can filter out as much as we choose. But perhaps this take some effort. Is it any accident that travel agents choose to be located in especially hectic city centre streets? Offering us an escape route?

cognitive benefits of natural environments

Perhaps unsurprisingly, recent research by Kaplan and Berman, psychologists at University of Michigan has found that a short urban walk can cause cognitive deficits compared to a walk in the park because natural settings do not require the same amount of cognitive effort. The concept of ART Attention Restoration Theory, suggests that immersion in nature may have a restorative effect (p21) Could small scale interventions - a glimpse of growth in unexpected places within the urban commercial environment have some of the same effects? Personal experience of comparing london Victoria to a rural walk would definitely support this. 

city sensory input colour

An anlysis of the distribution of colour in the same  200 yards in north street Brighton on monday looks like this : separation from the text, noise and people it looks less demanding ...

city information

A  sample of a record of text from shop fronts and displays of about 200 yds of North street Brighton on Monday looks like this : one aspect of information overload.

information overload

What intrigued me at first about Nacho Carbonnell Evolution series was the contrast to the rest of the Milan design shows. Amongst the onslaught of opulence and glamour of sumptuous materials and extravagant signature pieces, his work looks awkward, hand made, childlike. when you discover that its intention is to provide a refuge from information overload, and that it is literally made out of pulped printed material. - it makes all the more sense. There is something appealing about how the drab material, the crooked lines and apparently unstable structure compare to the ubiquitous sleek, stripped down, wipe clean urban shopping environments.

24 hour living

Recently Willliam Leith has identified the risks of the apparent convenience of 24 living. More evidence to support my hypothesis. Do we need some way to protect ourselves from this over-stimulation? Time out?