Author Sam Gosling visits Google's headquarters in Mountain View, CA, to discuss his book "Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You". This event took place June 17, 2008, as part of the authors@google series.
Does what's on your desk reveal what's on your mind? Do those pictures on your walls tell true tales about you? And is your favorite outfit about to give you away? For the last ten years psychologist Sam Gosling has been studying how people project (and protect) their inner selves. By exploring our private worlds (desks, bedrooms, even our clothes and our cars), he shows not only how we showcase our personalities in unexpected-and unplanned-ways, but also how we create personality in the first place, communicate it others, and interpret the world around us. Gosling, one of the field's most innovative researchers, dispatches teams of scientific snoops to poke around dorm rooms and offices, to see what can be learned about people simply from looking at their stuff.
Sam Gosling is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He has spent the last decade conducting research on how personality is expressed and perceived in everyday contexts. He has been profiled by the New York Times, Psychology Today, and other publications, and he is featured in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. This is his first book. He lives in Austin, Texas.
I know Sam Gosling well. In fact, at the end of this video he talks about our architecture firm and the Truehome Workshop project we have been engaged in for almost a decade.
Snoop is a good book, but Sam's research is a lot more profound than a lot of the PR about this book implies.
In our firm, because we have developed a systematic process that considers personality, values, emotional response and other "human factors" as criteria for our designs, research like Sam's is critical.
Knowing who you are and what you want subconsciously, and how you relate to the details of your home or office environment is incredibly useful when it comes to a project involving changing your living space.
That knowledge - or the lack of it - impacts your time, your money and your long term satisfaction.
We are in the process of taking the Workshop and turning it into web-based software at my little Internet start-up - Truehome.net. That's why Sam wrote about us in his book.
When we are done, we will be able to provide consumers and designers testing tools that will help them create living spaces that fit their personality, lifestyle, values, personal goals, budget and tastes - including many of the subconscious aspects of those values.
All those emotional preferences - the ones that make us buy, feel at home, overcome stress etc. - are nested in the brain and come from our temperament and our early development.
And we are often not aware of them. That blind side causes us a lot of grief. In my world - architecture and construction - it causes a host of problems for professionals and consumers alike!
The New York Times is publishing an article about all this on July 17th, 2008 in its Home section. Want to know more about this type of research and how it can be used?
Check it out!