The bell tolls for thee

There isn’t much on the surface connecting Ivan Pavlov to architecture.

As far as I can tell, the Russian scientist never designed a building. But he did have a dog, and he figured out how to make that dog drool pretty much on command.

Pavlov essentially discovered that reflexes can be conditioned; if you ring a bell every time you feed a dog, pretty soon that dog will start drooling at the sound of a bell even when there’s no food around.

To a degree, it’s the same concept that led an advertising agency working for the California Milk Processor Board to propose infusing some San Francisco bus shelters with the smell of chocolate-chip cookies. The thinking was that people connect the cookies with milk, and if they smell the cookies, they’ll want the milk.

People are hard-wired to respond to certain exterior stimuli. If we concede that, the logical next step is that people’s responses can be manipulated based on the exterior stimuli they come across and the frequency with which they experience it.

But does the same concept apply to architecture and design? I think it does, but I also think it’s limited.

The interior design of an office, for instance, can influence productivity. Arrange desks so people working on similar projects are facing each other, and they’ll likely talk more about their projects — unless those people don’t really like each other.

The same applies on a grander scale in a New Urbanism neighborhood. The simple definition of the idea is that front porches, sidewalks and other design elements can create a stronger sense of community.

I don’t doubt that New Urbanism experiences success in some situations. On the other hand, you can build front porches, but you can’t make people sit on them. You can create easy pedestrian access to shops, but you can’t make people go there.

There’s more at play than a simple reflex to a simple stimulus. That’s a fact that we’re aware of as we put together a New Year’s resolution of sorts for Wisconsin Builder.

In the next year, we’re going to do some redesign work on the publication. We’ll do so armed with all the Pavlovian-type facts about reader instincts.

We know how people read magazines. We know where your eyes automatically go when you look at a page. We know how to direct you through the publication.

We also know that content trumps all the design techniques. Your reading instincts don’t matter much if you don’t like what you’re reading. So quality content, as it always has been, will remain our top
priority.

Whether it’s architecture or magazine design, the fact is that people bring more to the table than a mouthful of saliva and an ear tuned to the ringing of a bell.