Designing for Stillness
A guide from Steve Austin Fine Art Photography
A guide to choosing art for restorative spaces
Most people choose art the way they choose a color they like. This guide asks you to choose it the way you would choose anything else that shapes how you feel in your own space, with attention to what it actually does.
A photograph does not sit quietly in the background while the real business of a room goes on around it. It is part of your visual environment, and your visual environment acts on your nervous system whether you planned for it or not. The question is not whether the art in a room affects you. It is whether it affects you in the direction you want.
You do not need a background in psychology to do this well. You need a few clear principles and a little patience with your own responses.
What is inside
What the research actually shows
Attention Restoration Theory, soft fascination, and what happens to stress markers and attention when people look at photographs of natural scenes. Including an honest account of where those findings stop.
What makes an image restorative
Five qualities that separate an image you still love in ten years from one you stop seeing in ten weeks. Restoration is not a subject. It is a set of qualities, and once you know them you will see them everywhere.
A checklist you can actually use
Five questions to ask standing in front of a specific image, and one more that is not about the image at all.
Matching the image to the room
Spaces for rest, spaces for focus, shared and social spaces, thresholds and passages. A home is not one environment. Neither is a clinic, an office, or a school.
Scale, placement, and medium
Why a landscape at twelve inches and the same landscape at sixty inches are two different psychological objects, and what that means for the wall you have in mind.
Living with the work over time
Habituation is why some art disappears into the wall within weeks of hanging. The images that resist it hold more than a single glance can exhaust.
Twelve pages, illustrated throughout. About ten minutes to read. It closes with the primary sources, so you can go to the research yourself.
How to get it
The guide is sent as a PDF when you join the list. Confirm your email and it arrives right after.
Occasional notes on new work after that. You can unsubscribe anytime.
Steve Austin teaches psychology and makes photographs, and treats the two as one practice. His graduate training is in behavioral neuroscience, and the courses he teaches include sensation and perception, biopsychology, and cognition. The photographs are the applied form of the same work. More about the artist, or see the collection.