Shape of Green

Great design is not just aesthetically pleasing; it actually can be good for our health, writes Lance Hosey in The New York Times (2/17/13). Lance is the chief sustainability officer of RTKL, an architecture firm, and author of The Shape of Green. He reports research showing that “just glancing at shades of green can boost creativity and motivation” because “we associate verdant colors with food-bearing vegetation — hues that promise nourishment.” Other studies show that “workers who could see the outdoors completed tasks 6 to 7 times more efficiently than those who couldn’t, generating an annual savings of nearly $3,000 per employee.”

Then there’s the magic of the golden rectangle, the proportions of which are roughly 5 by 8: “subtract a square from a golden rectangle, and what remains is another golden rectangle, and so on and so on — an infinite spiral.” The golden rectangle is “common in the shapes of books, television sets and credit cards, and they provide the underlying structure for some of the most beloved designs in history: the facades of the Parthenon and Notre Dame, the face of the Mona Lisa, the Stradivarius violin and the original iPod. Studies going back to the 19th century repeatedly prefer images in these proportions, but no one has known why.”

The golden rectangle is also “the ideal layout of a paragraph of text … The simple shape speeds up our ability to perceive the world.” Natural fractals, which are “irregular self-similar geometry,” show up in nature (e.g., leaf veins and snowflakes). Humans “respond so dramatically to this pattern that it can reduce stress levels by as much as 60 percent. One researcher has calculated that since Americans spend $300 billion a year dealing with stress-related illness, the economic benefits of these shapes, widely applied, could be in the billions … We think of great design as art, not science … But if every designer understood more about the mathematics of attraction,” design “could both look good and be good for you.”