The physical environment the medium through which we experience the world is so potent and determining of our experience that we are frequently forced to ignore it.
We try to choose the times we let the physical world fully into our conscious- ness in order to protect ourselves from the many unpleasant facts of our own lives and the lives of those around us. We seek experiences of beauty and respite in gardens and galleries to offset the more mundane visual events of our daily lives the boring, the chaotic, the disordered. But our experiences of the physical world are not so easy to shake off. This is in part because the human visual spatial system is located in the right limbic brain the same part of the brain that processes emotional response and relationships. This means that our attachment to the physical world is wired in, not optional, and that it directly connects to our emotions. the result is that we absorb the meanings conveyed by our environments even while the more conscious areas of our brains may try to shield us from them. When those meanings involve human emotion, they are all the more penetrating.

Several things strike me, a design psychologist, as I look at Lenard Smith’s photographs of this nursing home.
One is the persistence with which people attempt to personalize their spaces, no matter how small or constrained.

People have found room for only the briefest of mementos a cap, a tiny oral arrangement, a framed print which serve as echoes of a patient’s previous life, the connection to relatives and friends, or to interests that can no longer be pursued. the staff members, too, are operating in a restricted environment, and they, too, try to make the space their own with small items that can serve to remind them that they are lucky enough to still have a home and family.

The second is that, although most of us will see these environments as fragments and signals of the patients’ living spaces, these spaces, objects and mate- rials make up the staff’s workspace and the daily context of their lives, too. One tenet of design psychology is “caring for the caregiver.” those whose work is focused on caring for others children, the elderly, the ill or disabled must have their own needs met in order to have the energy and spirit to care for the people dependent upon them. although the images do not show us every room and every space in this nursing home, the bare and dreary surroundings speak of restricted resources and imply overburdened work days and nights.

For the many workers whose time cards we see, we imagine the sigh that accompanies the snap of the time clock, whether on the way in or on the way out. The third is how small things, when framed by the bounds of the photographs, are disturbing and make us uncomfortable: the way the window blinds are askew when it would take only a minute to put them straight; the deflated soccer ball telling us so clearly that activity and vigor are not part of the picture any more; the scarred wooden dresser sitting inexplicably in a hallway, the flotsam of someone’s personal life stranded in an institutional corridor; the unevenly-applied wallpaper whose graphic motifs disappear gradually into a wood chair rail. these small details convey the lack of care in a facility whose purpose is to care and they tell us about the diminished expectations of those who inhabit it.

Recent research in neurobiology has un- covered the existence of ‘mirror neurons’ premotor neurons that are in the same manner when the individual acts as when the he or she observes the same action performed by another. The neurological patterns of the passive observer ‘mirror’ the patterns of the individual who is actually performing the action or experiencing the event. in other words, it appears we have a built-in mechanism for empathy, to actually experience another’s mental state, to see the world as someone else sees or experiences it, and to respond emotionally the photographs in this book serve a similar function they provide us with the experience of others’ lives and emotions. they remind us of things we would rather not know the diminished options and an end- of-life experience that is about loss and loneliness. But these images are equally forceful cues about the small things that make up our larger environment. as a collection, these photographs allow us to imagine the possibility of making those small things conducive to optimism and grace.

8 February 2008
Susan Painter, Ph.D.
Forrest Painter Design, Venice, California AC Martin Partners, Los Angeles