Why Our Brains Want Red Furniture

Dutch designer Merel Bekking is no stranger to research-based design. In the past, the thin, brainy Bekking, who wears a stunning hue of bright red lipstick, created designs based on people’s bad habits, as well as a jewellery series based on the economic crisis.

This time around, she worked with the Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging Amsterdam and neuroscientist Steven Scholte to design a new line of furniture. Initially launched at Milan Design Week, the project, called Brain_manufacturing, is currently on show at the DMY International Design Festival Berlin. DMY is a whopper of a design festival set in a former Nazi airport hangar, which this year focuses on social design and science.

As we know, design festivals are often filled with dapper geeks in somewhat sparse environments, as everyone stands around trading business cards and postcards while doing a little bit of object-worshipping.

“Everybody here makes something beautiful,” whispered Bekking, while looking around the fair, “but it's subjective taste and emotion.”

That subjectivity led her to wanting to find the “perfect” design, in the sense of a no-fail, get-me-a-manufacturer-now surefire sell. You know, the type of stuff that will subconsciously take over all living rooms by storm, in a Godzilla, ultra-brain powered, watch-out-IKEA way (add a ‘roar’ button in there somewhere).

In other words, it isn’t easy to break into the elite design world, so why not avoid the difficult decision-making design process—like selecting shapes, colors, materials, not to mention time and money—when you can depend entirely on neuroscience? Think of it like search engine optimization for furniture.

She tested 20 participants: 10 women and 10 men all between the ages of 20 and 30 years old, whose brain activity was studied using MRI. That’s the demographic that usually boxes beds up on milk crates, but anyway, in a perfect world, that’s your clientele.

Bekking showed the participants 250 pictures, everything from Goya paintings to photos of people wrestling. There were five textures, 10 colors, and eight shapes shown without context. Poor people. They literally had no idea why they were looking at art inside of an MRI scanner. “In order for us to get the most objective answers as possible, we didn’t tell them,” explained Bekking.

It wasn’t long before they figured it out, as after the scan, she handed them a questionnaire. “When I asked them what kind of furniture they want, they said they want blue wood that is round-shaped,” said Bekking. “That is really different than what their brain wants.”

Red, plastic, round furniture excites the young mind, apparently. While a test on 20 people is a considerably low number to base research on, it’s a start. The MRI scans showed more brain activity with plastic than wood. The brain also loves the color red, far more than it likes purple, yellow or orange (although it sort of likes green, blue, and gray). And lastly, it likes “organic” shapes, rather than round, square or angular shapes.

Even though some of the participants said they didn’t like red, they still said they liked the furniture when it was revealed to them. “There’s something interesting going on there,” said Bekking.

When you walk up to the red mirror and table, there’s something comforting about the design. Your brain just registers with it and chills out with the peculiar organic shapes. When asked if she had the goal to make comforting domestic design, Bekking replied somewhat sharply, saying she wanted to take all the emotion out of the project.

But the goal is to go one step further, creating entire rooms based on individual brain scans. Neurological consumerism, coming right up.