How Our Environment Dictates Our Success.

Designing for Success: How Our Surroundings Shape Achievement and Well-Being.

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While it’s long been known that our surroundings affect our emotions and actions, recent research shows this influence may be far greater than we realize. Studies reveal that success and productivity are not solely products of talent or effort; rather, our environment plays a significant role in shaping our motivation, mood, and well-being. Thanks to advancements in neuroscience and psychology, we now understand the precise types of spaces that stimulate us positively or negatively. This knowledge places a responsibility on designers and developers to create environments that support and enhance human potential.

Although the idea, that the places we visit influences our emotions and by extension impacts our actions and abilities, is far from new, the extent and magnitude of this impact has been considerably underestimated. Until recently.

We tend to blame failure on a lack of talent or willpower and conversely attribute success to natural gifts, hard work and effort. Of course, those things matter. However, recent studies clearly indicate that motivation and talent have been somewhat overvalued and that our environment in most cases may matter more.

Since the earliest times, humans have needed to be sensitive to their surroundings to survive, which means that our environment has a much bigger impact on our mood, our actions, our productivity our health and even our wellbeing than most of us realize.

Although evidence based design has been around since the mid 80’s it really only in the last 20 odd years with the help of advanced technology, neuroscience and psychological studies, that we are now beginning to understand the exact type of environments that stimulate people both positively and negatively

Now that the data is out there and freely available designers and developers have an immense ability and also an immense moral responsibility to create a built environment that is less self-serving and a little more focused on serving and triggering the best possible human condition..

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