Fractal Design Strategies for Enhancement of Knowledge Work Environments

Converging lines of research suggest a deep linkage between cognitive and emotional processes and settings displaying a rich visual fractal structuring in the 1.3–1.5 dimensional range. Reanalysis of a previous empirical study on interior design inducing reduction of performance stress from knowledge work suggests that this fractal dimensionality of a cabin panel surface pattern was the key environmental modification affecting subjects. in natural environments, fractal dimensionality in this range is most often associated with sinuous watercourses, undulating horizon lines and branching tree structures, all of which had high survival value for human ancestors in our evolutionary history. Other empirical research indicates that cognitive performance associated with visual search and access to working memory can be improved by inducing a ‘convergence to pattern’ of fractal environmental structure and the neural processes to which it seems particularly attuned. These in turn imply significant fractal design enhancements for work settings which are either semi-isolated and/or confined for technology/health/security reasons, or habitats in remote and harsh environments.