Browsing by Subject "stressitesti"

Nature has been said to have relaxing effects on human. In today’s world, people’s life takes place mostly indoors so it is essential to seek relaxing effects also indoors. Decorative wood surfaces may bring those relaxing effects of nature to an indoor environment. This research focuses on researching the restorative effect of wooden surfaces through people’s preferences and the abilities of wooden surfaces. In this research, people’s preferences between different wooden surfaces were compared with the use of haptic and visual sensations. All the surfaces were lightly sanded to minimize the effects of pro-cessing and to concentrate merely on the comparison of different materials. The selected surface materials were conifer glulam, birch glulam, birch plywood, conifer plywood, MDF-board (Medium Density Fibreboard) and OSB-board (Oriented Strand Board). The study was divided into three sec-tions: the first section concentrated on people’s preferences towards wooden surfaces only with haptic sensations, the second part included only visual sensations and the third part included both haptic and visual sensations. The third section also included an open question for participants about the potential use of each wood material. Some of the participants also took part in a stress test during the third section. The stress test aimed to examine whether the participants’ heart rate and blood pressure lowered as they experienced the haptic and visual effects of wood material and if there were differ-ences between different materials. In the preference study people were instructed to rate the descriptiveness of different adjectives with all the wooden samples on a scale of 1–7 (1 very little, 7 very much). The three sections of the study made it possible to compare participants’ haptic and visual sensations. The visual sensations were observed to have more dominant effect than haptic sensations on the participants’ preferences. The visually most preferred wood materials were also found the most potential use for. These materials were instructed to be used in places they were seen whereas the less preferred materials were instructed to be used in hidden structures and to remain unseen. Both the heart rate and blood pressure lowered from the start of the test with all the materials except with OSB-board that caused a little rise of heart rate and blood pressure.