The topic of tidying is apparently so interesting these days that there are TV shows and even whole books devoted to cleaning up clutter. While we do know that order and disorder have a great influence on our wellbeing, it turns out they affect us in different ways than we might have thought.
While there’s no scientific literature that provides a recipe for a successful party, there certainly is one for a complete flop. Clean the apartment as if it was a lab, arrange the chairs symmetrically in rows on both sides of the table, and when the guests arrive, switch on the bright lights and turn off the music. If there’s time left and perfection is the goal, it might be a good idea to also remove all the art off the walls, and even better, paint them light blue. With such a setting, there’s no need to worry about any guests overstaying their welcome. A space that is too bright, too tidy, and too quiet will quash any attempts at conversation—as if someone had set up sound-proof partitions between the invitees.
Chairs Against the Wall
The relationship between space and social behavior was discovered by the English psychiatrist Humphry Osmond. Admittedly, he went down in the history of medicine for coining the term “psychedelics” and being a keen advocate for their use in treating mental disorders. He also had other noteworthy accomplishments and, quite unintentionally, became the founder of environmental psychology, a field which focuses on the influence of one’s surroundings on the human psyche.
At the beginning of Osmond’s medical career, there was little indication that he would soon wander into interior design. The former naval officer began treating schizophrenia after World War II, but the new therapies he experimented with were not convincing. London’s medical community did not share his enthusiasm for LSD and mescaline, which is why, in 1951, they were relieved to hear of Osmond’s move to Canada, where he began working as a director at an experimental psychiatric hospital in Weyburn. It was advertised as a state-of-the-art treatment and research facility, but what the British psychiatrist encountered was a “bleak institution” more like a prison than a hospital (although, it would soon improve under his leadership). Osmond was particularly struck by the sight of the geriatric ward for women: “Everything was new and shiny, neat and clean. There was enough space, and the colors were cheerful. The only trouble was that the longer the patients stayed in the ward, the less they seemed to talk to each other. Gradually, they were becoming like the furniture, permanently and silently glued to the walls at regular intervals between the beds. In addition, they all seemed depressed,” recounts anthropologist Edward T. Hall in his 1966 book on social space, The Hidden Dimension.
Concerned with his patients’ condition, Osmond proposed a groundbreaking thesis. In his opinion, it wasn’t poor treatment that caused depression; rather, it was the poorly organized space that made it difficult for patients to form friendships, intensifying a painful sense of alienation and loneliness. What did it matter if the chairs in the lobby were new, so long as they were set up along the walls, far away from one another? During visits, relatives arranged them in friendly circles, but in the evening they went back against the walls, because according to the staff, it was easier to manage. The recently repainted corridors remained empty—devoid of plants, art, or tables at which to sit. Indeed, old, dirty, and ugly hospitals are not particularly beneficial to recovery, but Osmond found that an extreme approach to order and tidiness isn’t either.
The longer he thought about it, the more he noticed public spaces that thwart wellbeing and prompt people to maintain social distance. Not only hospitals, but all kinds of waiting rooms, railway stations, offices, and churches with benches in rows are all “de-socializing.” It’s hard to feel at ease in such places, and it’s even harder to talk to somebody, even if one runs into an acquaintance. It’s different in “social” cafés, where tables are arranged in nonchalant disarray—as opposed to fast-food bars or canteens, where one is supposed to eat quickly and leave, rather than lounge around drinking tea for hours—or cozy bookstores and city parks. Environments like these make social interactions so easy, even a chat with a stranger may come naturally.
A Space is a Person
Osmond was a reformer at heart, but his true passion was psychedelic therapy, not architecture. That’s why he entrusted the revamping of the hospital space to a specialist, Kiyoshi Izumi. Before redesigning the building, the architect took LSD a few times to better understand the perception of people with schizophrenia and other mental impairments. During his hallucinogenic journeys, he felt the fear of long, empty corridors, and harsh fluorescent hospital lighting.
Another expert hired by Osmond was Robert Sommer, then a PhD candidate in psychology. Drawing on his knowledge on mental mechanisms, he was tasked with arranging the space so that interactions would come easier. This was a big revelation for the young researcher. After completing his work in a Canadian care center, Sommer devoted the rest of his life to researching the influence of the environment on the human psyche. Many years later, as an award-winning environmental psychologist, he wrote in his book Personal Space: “[Man] will adapt to hydrocarbons in the air, detergents in the water, crime in the streets, and crowded recreational areas. Good design becomes a meaningless tautology if we consider that man will be reshaped to fit whatever environment he creates. The long-range question is not so much what sort of environment we want, but what sort of man we want.”
The Weyburn hospital’s main goal was to make people feel less lonely, which Sommer accomplished. The intuition with Osmond proved correct: that by simply rearranging the chairs in the lobby and adding bedside tables for personal belongings, was enough to encourage conversation and make patients feel much better. However, the changes to the geriatric ward were initially met with distrust, not only from the staff, who found it difficult to maintain perfect tidiness, but also by the patients themselves. This was another key finding of the fledgling field of environmental psychology—even if the prevailing order isn’t good for us (or is indeed harmful and causes so-called “environmental stress”), still the decision to change the space around us comes with difficulty. Minor trifles such as replacing a rectangular table with an oval one—though socially advisable (as demonstrated by Sommer’s research)—can be a revolution that our brain will resist for a long time.
Experiments conducted by Sommer in the following years confirmed his thesis that the environment affects us more than previously thought. Due to his own discoveries, the psychologist also realized why he had such difficulty learning at school as a child. He linked it to the unfortunate positioning of his desk—he always had to lean over in order to see what was written on the blackboard. The year he finally moved desks, schoolwork became much easier. Sommer claimed that the problem wasn’t poor vision (his eyes were fine), but an unfriendly environment, where students sat at evenly aligned desks, had difficulty interacting with each other and the teacher hidden behind a desk, and—if he was exceptionally unlucky—even with the blackboard.
Sommer’s publications on the impact of space and environment on children—namely, their performance and motivation to learn—led to a thorough redesign of many schools in the United States. Not only educational facilities were changing, but also public spaces in general. Designers began to pay equal attention to making interiors look pleasant and welcoming. Just like in the Canadian hospital, the theory was again confirmed in practice—children schooled in so-called “open classrooms” (Sommer’s term) became more open to learning themselves.
Teachers unconsciously altered their teaching style, as if the new arrangement of desks made them into better educators. It’s because of those past discoveries, that today’s alternative schools have no desks, and during lessons students and teachers gather in a circle. Sommer initiated a new way of thinking in architecture, sociology, and psychology. In his view, all these fields needed a fresh approach—“For too long we have accepted physical forms and administrative arrangements based upon outdated views of human activity,” he wrote in his seminal book Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design.
The Invisible Dimension
Spaces speak to us, and we, perhaps subconsciously, can hear them loud and clear. Each of its elements—light, silence, noise, colors, the order of objects, distance, and more—shapes our behavior and attitude. It’s hard to think lovingly of our fellow passengers pressed up against us in a crowded elevator or a bus. Sommer even claimed that when our personal space is violated and there’s nothing we can do about it, we struggle to perceive our fellow sufferers (and at the same time, the perpetrators of our anguish) as sentient beings. In order to endure and stay calm, we dehumanize others—for that short while between the ground and the 10th floor, fellow humans get treated as objects, because it’s easier to bear a mannequin rather than a living person invading our personal space. Sommer explained that the brain chooses what it can endure more easily—it turns out that most of us can tolerate messy surroundings more than a crowd of people breathing down our necks.
Similarly, it’s easier for us to live in self-created clutter than staying in a space tidied up by someone else. Parents of teenagers—beware of cleaning your children’s rooms! Your noble intention of collecting socks and dirty cups is exactly the same as a parent-in-law finding a “better arrangement” for the pots and pans in your kitchen. Both cases are examples of violating someone’s private territory. As noted by Edward T. Hall, protecting one’s own space is one of the basic natural mechanisms in nature, observed not only in humans, but also, for example, in dogs, monkeys, and even bees.
“Man has developed his territoriality in an almost unimaginable way,” Hall wrote in 1959’s The Silent Language. “Yet we treat space somewhat as we treat sex. It is there but we don’t talk about it. And if we do, we certainly are not expected to get technical or serious about it. The man of the house is always somewhat apologetic about ‘his chair.’ […] For some unknown reason, our culture has tended to play down or cause us to repress and dissociate the feelings we have about space. We relegate it to the informal and are likely to feel guilty whenever we find ourselves getting angry because someone has taken our place.”
Our territory is us—this is the basic principle of proxemics, a science created by Hall, investigating the interplay between space and humans. And while protecting one’s territory stems from biological needs, the definitions of clutter, order, and personal space vary in each culture. According to Hall, these issues are approached differently by the Ordnung-loving Germans, the Poles who see no harm in “a little confusion,” and teenagers around the world who each treat their mess as a shield protecting them from the outside world.
Most likely, Osmond would have been surprised to hear from Hall that socializing and desocializing spaces vary in different cultures, or that a bright, quiet, and clean space, considered as desocializing in Western culture in general, can be relaxing and pleasant for an individual. On the other hand, Hall, who passed away in 2009, would probably be interested to hear about people living in the virtual realm of the metaverse… Or, perhaps he would just nod his head and say what he’s said before, that any space—messy or not—is fine, as long as it’s somewhere we feel good, that allows us to relate to others.
This translation was re-edited for context and accuracy on January 12, 2023.
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