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

One morning I woke up and thought my job is frivolous. You see, I'm an

interior

design

er. I only do nice things in people's houses. I don't save lives. I am not an intellectual leader for my generation. I just know how to organize a room beautifully, but where is the longevity in that? And as I stood there questioning my purpose and having what could only be described as a huge pity party, I began to search for the deeper side of

design

ing people's homes while spinning the word home around in my mind. I realized how important they are to us, here we keep our loved ones safe, we hide from the world when we need to, but above all we express ourselves here, they are our refuges and we have an emotional connection with them.

I started to notice the hugging trend. What is the Danish principle of living in harmony with home that is being talked about? Maybe we were all looking for this emotional connection with our environment. The good thing was that the

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I read about Hugar in magazines and blogs, the response to satisfaction was really going to be. simple apparently all I needed was a chunky knit Thro to make me happy then my inner voice spoke put on the chunky knit blanket Phoebe it was time to step away from Instagram Pinterest magazines products and trends to create spaces full of contentment First I needed to look at people with empathy, 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 Big Brother to the Chrysler Building. It's a good design, um, but I understood a lot, it's a bad design. Now the funny thing about design is that you don't really notice a good design, you're just using it, you sure notice the aesthetics of a room, it looks good, therefore. You like it, but you don't realize how you feel, you just feel happy, think of it as if you have a rock in your shoe, I'm sure you notice that you have a great pair of shoes, but you don't walk down the street thinking, God. mine.

I'm having a great time walking in these shoes. I don't have a single stone inside. Irritates me. They are simply doing their job. Now you're walking down the street with a pebble in your shoe and that's all you can think about. It's annoying, it hurts, where can I sit and work this out? This pebble not only fills your shoe, it now also fills your head. Bad design is like the pebble in your shoe, you notice it all the time, it's irritating to squeeze the furniture. For sitting, it's annoying not being able to put things away because a closet is too hard to reach and it's dangerous to trip over a step that's a different height than the others on the path, so how do we create the good design we need?

To begin with, we observe how we function in our spaces and only then can we understand what the pebble is for us in these spaces. A few years ago, UCLA decided to do just that with their home life in the 21st century project, now what surprised me was that they measured the emotional effects of clutter on people. Stress levels were measured and found to be the same as post-traumatic stress disorder. To put that in context, they said that mothers and mainly women were the ones who had this physical response. The mental reaction to the things his children threw on the ground was on the same level as soldiers who had first-hand experience of the traumas of war, that's crazy;

However, if we look at it this way, if the clutter is literally depressing, then the crippling part of depression is where it is difficult to find motivation to tackle things, this will make cleaning up that clutter insurmountable and just like that, you are stuck in a cycle of clutter, humor, clutter, humor, clutter, humor, until you're emotionally drowning in your own dirty laundry, now the obvious answer is to throw it all out there, a stress-free life, but life is never as simple as that. We live chaotic and messy lives, we will always own things and bless them, our children will just leave their things everywhere, we cannot alter our lifestyles to suit our environment. unsustainable we must adopt our lifestyle in our

interior

s that is good design I am not the first person to think that Margarita Shuta Lioki was the first woman who was allowed to study architecture in Austria at the beginning of the 20th century, a few years later she was working.

In the Frankfurt project, which involved creating affordable apartments for working-class families, she was assigned to the kitchen. Now what I love about his design approach is that instead of improving upon the accepted kitchen design at the time, he did detailed time and motion studies to determine the duration of each process and created his kitchen around these flow flows. job. The results were the invention of the first equipped kitchen, which became Nick Name, the housewife's laboratory. Now, the role of the kitchen over a hundred years since Margarett's design has changed greatly if I return to the UCLA study, it now has a new nickname, the command center, where instead of being a room pushed into the back of the house where a woman prepared and cooked food for her family in private, has now become the center of the home, not only with the food prepared here but also with the life lived here, they have become huge symbols of status and demand the largest footprint in our home, but how do we emotionally deal with all this space?

I call this the Goldilocks analogy, what happens if a space is too big? Open-plan offices have been under the microscope for their detrimental effect on people's health. On a basic level, we get sick

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often because we're exposed to more germs, handing out colds like candy, but it's the openness of space that bothers people. Although the open-plan office was designed to mean more human interaction between co-workers, it is actually starting to isolate them as the annoying noise of people talking and phones ringing and the tapping of typing are pushing people away. to plug in their headphones and close their world to a very small box that is just them and their computer, they have become the machinery that runs the office and the human interaction that these spaces were designed to encourage is no longer happening, this has led to a high rate of depression in office workers, another big space that is not as harmonious as we would like is the command center kitchen, again noise is an issue with little acoustics bouncing off hard surfaces and also with the people who culminate here, so their things create disorder, but it is our human nature that is becoming Restless as these spaces become expansive, if we stick to our basic animal instinct to survive in the wild , we do not seek to eat in the exposed part of the forest, that makes us vulnerable and we are at greater risk of being eaten by a bear, our ingrained instinct.

It plays a lot with how we settle into a space and without creating a sense of protection where we eat we get nervous, this makes Goldilocks Mumble this space too big, but any space that is too small, the locker room is the most powerful room in the retail according to To imagine retail, 71% of those who try things go on to buy, but how do we feel about these small spaces? The costumes are divided into two categories. There is the luxury wardrobe with the expensive goodies, which is comfortable and cozy, in which we feel good. We are in these spaces, so trying on clothes is a pleasure.

Cheaper fashion chains have a very different feel with signs of claustrophobic spaces and lighting that makes you look like KN of the Living Dead. We made a quick decision on our cheap item. It's about abandonment. and has created a phenomenon that psychologists call locker room anger where we feel down on ourselves, even taking that feeling of low self-esteem home, this makes Goldilocks scream that this space is too small. Design is about working with the space we have. There is a balance to be made between the claustrophobic and the exposed and it is a balance between creating a sense of space in small areas and creating intimate zones in large areas and, like Goldilocks, we take the stone from our shoe and say that this feels perfect as interior designers.

I have the tools, from design to lighting, to solve all of these problems and create relaxing spaces. Suddenly, I don't feel so frivolous anymore. Nothing demonstrates this better than this story about black prisons and suicide. On average, a prisoner commits suicide every 3 days, the majority of those attempts will occur on the inmates first night in prison. A few years ago the prison service decided to question whether the environments they were placing these people in were harming them. They brought on board color psychologist Professor Hillary Dolk. It was his story of the showers that demonstrates the powerful effect of color, these showers were Stark cubicles with 20 by 20 bright white tiles, but these showers were not just showers, they were a gateway from civilian life to prison life , think about what that must be like for a moment, you have left your family behind your life behind and when you walk into that shower you have even left your own clothes behind the last shred of your own identity you were surrounded by an austere clinical space and you are scared by what you are about to enter into The damage that the prison service was seeing in those showers was enormous, with broken tiles and fixtures now with broken tiles, not only is the damage coming to the prison, but now you have someone who has created your own weapon, how do you solve something like that? they changed the tiles to pale terracotta the pale terracotta showers created an environment that was not as disturbing in the prisons this was implemented the showers were not damaged the suicide rate was reduced now it's fair to say that when you're standing with your paint board on your hand asking what color you are going to decorate the living room, it is unlikely that you are thinking of H French gray.

I wonder if that will make me feel clinically depressed, but you will have an emotional response to colors that repel you. by and Attracted by I know a woman who cannot cooperate with the Grays and the Interiors since she moved from the US, it is the loss of the brightness in the American sky that makes her in exchange for our dirty gray skies the that the idea of ​​putting that makes her melancholic. The gray sky on her wall fills her with horror and no matter how modern the gray is, she will never feel emotionally comfortable in that room.

I've already 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 satisfy our needs analytically then they will have no soul there is an art in doing beautiful things in a home that is also something healing however we have become obsessed with the visual side only consuming interior design through 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 just see the results of someone else's design.

Trip, we see a picture of Google's new office and Come on, cool, they got a robbery, we should get a robbery, then we'll be as cool as Google, but it's not about the robbery. Google is using the layout of its New London office to fight for the best tech brains in Britain. The robbery is the finishing touch of their Journey design that says that we welcome people who think outside the box to our workplace, if you copy the robot without understanding it, you will end up with a Rowo in the middle of your office with workers refusing to accept it. because they feel stupid for doing it, if we make the design based solely on the visual wow factor and don't take our own journey to get there, we are missing out on the incredible opportunity to create our own innovative design, so let's get back to the moment.

I'm clutching my thick net blanket feeling frivolous and wondering about the longevity of my life's work, but it's not about my work, it's about the people involved in my work and their experience of living in it, with a holistic approach we can create spaces that are found. our physical, emotional and visual needs, and I passionately believe that there is not just good design here, but great design and just like not having a stone in your shoe, you may not even notice it, you will just feel at peace . Thank you so much.