Kate Worsley’s Personal Space – MBTI for Interior Design
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Priya Raju is heavily into interior design these days and she picked up this book Personal Space by Kate Worsley. Worsley has come up with an interesting approach for helping you figure out how the interiors of your home should be designed. One could say the approach is analogous to the Myers Briggs Type Instrument (MBTI). She classifies people into 6 types. She then helps you determine your type by giving you choices to make throughout the book. Instead of making the entire book a multiple choice Q&A, she deftly weaves in the choices alongside an explanation of the various apects of interior designing. For instance, Worsley would describe say a Kitchen and the various things that go into the design while giving you choices to make. Each choice you make fills out a parameter in. The typing chart. The 6 Worsley types and their descriptions verbatim from the book: 1. Easy – A down-to-earth and practical sensibility. Treasures the simple pleasures and upholds enduring values. Appreciates comfort, but finds sustainable, functional solutions, much like Urban. 2. Urban – A confident, modern spirit. Worldly-wise, sophisticated and technologically assured. Highly aspirational, yet shares with Pure a respect for simplicity and functionalism. 3. Sensuous – Values subtlety and comfort just as much as indulgence. Knows how to prolong sensual satisfaction by balancing it with order and harmony. Can be nostalgic, as can Easy. 4. Pure – A more rigorous, meditative temperament that relishes the intellectual challenge of pure form and colour. Will put up with inconvenience to achieve results much like Maverick. 5. Wild – Displays a pronounced taste for the extreme, the exotic, even decadent. In love with glamour and demands stimulation. Ruled by sensory pleasure, but far more theatrical than Sensuous. 6. Maverick – Always ready to improvise, and ready to explore every whim. Unpretentious and witty, with an eclectic approach. Impact and contrast matter almost as much as they do to Wild. Priya asked me a bunch of questions from the book and told me that my type is Easy. Great, another aspect of my personality figured out. Worsley also has a great section on colours. This one caught my attention:
“We understand something of colour perception, how the brain responds to different wavelengths; that the eye requires most adjustment to look at red and none at all for green, making these colours respectively most wearing and most restful.” Based on that I started wondering, is that the reason plants have so much green in them ? – maybe we’ll destroy them more if they are predominantly in other colours ? Food for thought, eh! If you are into interior design, don’t miss this book.
Or, our ancestors eyes made a trade-off by adopting to the more ubiquitous green and a certain level of anxiety and caution to the color of setting sun.
Good one Kesava. Plants originated long before humans did. You are right, most likely our eyesight adapted to the green plants rather than the other way round. Additionally, since almost-human-style eyesight with color vision originated only as late as the Great Apes in the tree of evolution. So the possibility of plants having adapted to animals is very unlikely.
I knew a great Ayurvedic Doctor during childhood whose medicine for headache was simply to relax and look at green leaves – He even recomended it as a daily meditation routine. (I did greatly benefit from the same). Guess this is some scientific explanation.
Thanks Sibu. Most eye doctors today advice you to take a break after every hour of work on a computer and look at some greenery to relax your eyes. As you say, now we know why.