How We Curate Our Worldview

In the introduction to their 2016 book ‘Whiplash’, authors Joi Ito and Jeff Howe (co-directors of MIT’s Media Lab) use furniture as a metaphor to express their interest in the phenomenology of ideas, stating:

“Imagine for a moment that your opinions, your political beliefs, and all your conscious ideas about the world and your place within it are the furniture inside a house. You acquire these quite consciously over a long period of time, discarding some, keeping others, and acquiring new pieces as the need arises.”

The imagery may seem insignificant, but as we’ll see, the practice of visualizing our ideas and opinions as items we place in a room, and the room and its contents collectively as our worldview, has tremendous utility as a metaphor. It serves as both a helpful and playful means of meta-cognition; that is, as a way to think about thinking.

Adopting this imagery can aid us in thinking carefully about how our own perspectives are constructed as well as improve our understanding of the “inner house” of others.

Similar to good design, the thorough and responsible critique of one’s own storehouse of perspectives and the patient influence/engagement of others’ views are skill sets—ones that can be learned and improved upon with practice.

Interior designers hold the conviction that the spaces we find ourselves in can significantly influence our being. From lighting and color, the quality of the objects around us, the flow and utility of a given space, or the overall unity or disunity of the room; all aspects impact us in ways we aren’t often aware of. These spatial characteristics can affect our mood, level of focus, wakefulness, etc., without us being aware of their impact. They liberate and restrict our movements in various ways, guiding behaviors that sooner or later become habitual. Environmental influence will have its way with us whether we are conscious of it or not.

As Churchill said, “We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us”.

Similarly, what the physical environment is to the body, the ideological environment is to the mind. Our perspectives and ideas are like personal items uniquely arranged in the room of our mental space. Such arrangements (or lack thereof) color our interpretation of the world around us and provide us with patterns of thought that eventually manifest as behavior.

While there are many lessons applicable to metacognition that we can take from both the process and experience of interior design, I’ll focus here on just a handful: Curation, Arrangement, New Objects, Hoarding, Restoration, Flow, and Iteration.

Curation

Item curation is one of the main pillars impacting the feel of an interior space. It’s best to think of curation as an umbrella term for a collection of mini-practices. Namely, a cyclical process of acquisition, evaluation, and disposal. As the arbiter of both quality and quantity, our curation practice ultimately determines the stock of our housed items.

This is important given the impact our objects have on us. The items that surround us both reflect and reinforce who we are and what we value. The world-renowned art collector, dealer, and interior designer, Axel Vervoordt, describes the items he keeps in his home as “…people that I am in conversation with every day. They shape me as I speak with them morning after morning”.

This holds true of our ideas and beliefs as well. The thoughts and assumptions we carry can be as prominent as the leather couch in our living room or as subtle as the knobs on our kitchen cabinets. But regardless of their prominence or noticeability, they maintain sway over the person we are and the person we are becoming as we engage with the space day after day.

These mental objects also undergo a process of curation, though often subconsciously and haphazardly. The key is to bring the curation of our ideas or beliefs into conscious awareness. Responsible curation, both in ideas and design, is making the process intentional, proactive, and considered.

There is wisdom in periodically taking the time to deliberately appraise and curate your perspectives, like the items in your house. While time-consuming and labor-intensive, the effort is worth it.

I recall the first time I received a significant amount of money from one of my first commissions in my early days as a freelancer that I put toward redesigning my entire bedroom. At the time, it was filled with items from my childhood and not very well arranged. The act of evaluating each of my items — assessing their necessity and whether they reflected who I was then versus who I was as a child — was formative in and of itself. Similarly, as we mature or as circumstances change around us, we may discover some ideas shaping our behavior that may not actually be reflective of our values.

Beyond having many items from childhood that stick around, we also inherit many items from our progenitors. These heirlooms and childhood items are nostalgic, meaning they are both familiar and cherished. The characteristic of nostalgia when applied to ideas has pros and cons, which we will think about later. For now, the important point is consciously taking stock of the various objects we house in our heads and building a familiarity with our process of acquisition, evaluation, and disposal.

Something that can aid us in this task of properly judging our mental storehouse is the practice of arrangement.

Arrangement (and Rearrangement)

More than the objects themselves, the arrangement of objects in relation to one another can change our engagement and evaluation of those objects. Context is everything, and experimenting with different arrangements will give us different perspectives on the items we have. Altering its context can highlight the value of an item that has previously eluded us. The ugly porcelain cat your grandmother gave you may look terrible on the living room table but suddenly becomes beautiful and charming when placed on the window sill in the kitchen, for example. Conversely, a shift in context may also reveal the cheapness of an item that at one time seemed luxurious.

In parallel, ideas may retain or lack value in light of other ideas. Like our physical objects, the practice of arrangement requires iteratively placing different ideas next to others in a quest for harmony. A particular viewpoint may have looked great in your mental space in the past, but when placed next to a piece of new evidence, it may seem to no longer hold water. Arrangement aids us in curating our mental space by revealing what parts of our perspective are incongruent.

This idea of harmony is an important point that we will keep coming back to. On top of it being something we seem to have a natural need for, it’s a prominent marker in good design, as well as a healthy mental space. While both your items and ideas can be disparate and varied, they should nonetheless be arranged together harmoniously, in a way that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

This is a good analog to the difference between mere knowledge and understanding. If we conceive of knowledge as individual pieces of information, understanding is the connection and harmony between those pieces. The constellation of our ideas is as important as the quality of the individual ideas themselves.

It’s also important to mention that although we should arrange our perspective in a manner that maximizes harmony, our process should be slow and considered. Quick and forced arrangement can lead to suboptimal outcomes in both design and ideation. The awareness of a lack of harmony in our worldview creates cognitive dissonance — a state of mind that our brain is tempted to forcibly resolve. However, haphazardly forcing relationships between disparate ideas may lead to poor resolutions like conspiracy theories, over-simplified perspectives, or extremist viewpoints.

In short, seek harmony, but don’t force it. Arranging in search of establishing harmony requires patience.

This is especially true when dealing with the acquisition of new objects.

The Trouble With New Objects

Acquiring new items can be fun and exciting when we are in need of such things. Deliberately seeking decorations or furniture to fill an empty space and complete a room allows us to welcome the novelty item with ease. But there are times when our spaces already feel complete, and we are unwillingly given a new item that we must find a good place for — a tricky situation, especially if we find the item undesirable.

We grow accustomed to our long-lived-in spaces and the status quo they provide. Throwing a new item into the mix can feel like tossing a large stone into a tranquil pond; disrupting the established harmony that took us so long to procure.

The disruption might occur because these items just don’t fit the aesthetic of our interior. Like a room with a dark antique theme being disrupted by a bright neon-colored object, for example. Other times, the disruption occurs because the new item may just not fit in the room without being physically awkward; like trying to squeeze a new couch or living room chair into an already-cluttered area.

To maintain cohesion, we are resistant to objects that don’t fit the present theme or spacing of the room and can find ourselves growing an inner disdain for such items.

But it may be that our space just has to be reordered for the new object to make sense and have its proper place in the room. The space needs to be reworked, perhaps old items thrown out, to include the new acquisition sensibly. Finding a solution will require us to revisit the steps of curation and arrangement. We’ll have to take a quick regression back into that initial chaos and patiently rearrange our space to develop a newly established harmony that involves the new item.

The same is usually true for our encounters with new ideas and why they can sometimes seem so troublesome.

More often than we realize, we reject the new ideas we encounter, not based on their truth value, but because we can’t easily find a space to place them in our cognitive model that would maintain harmony. Like our interior object counterparts, the novel idea may not immediately meld well with an established psychological theme (our ideas can be thematically colored and tied together by a particular political party, faith tradition, or through simple familiarity and nostalgia). Or the idea may be “too big” to squeeze into our cognitive schema (a ‘minor’ novel idea — such as a new route home to avoid traffic — is easier to incorporate into our worldview than a ‘large’ idea such as a religious conversion).

Accepting and incorporating the new information will require us to rearrange our thinking space.

And this takes time.

The necessity of patience is worth repeating. We are very quick to dismiss things that aren’t congruent with our perspective, without giving them the space for consideration they may deserve. Since new ideas can disrupt harmony, our natural resistance to them will muddy a proper appraisal of the idea. Our minds seem to have difficulty distinguishing between an idea that is wrong or unhelpful and an idea that may have value but doesn’t immediately fit well in our mental space.

A helpful practice when encountering a new idea that you are resistant to is taking the time to ask yourself “Does this idea actually lack value? Or am I simply having trouble incorporating it into my comfortable headspace?”. Patient and deliberate thought will help unveil the distinction — particularly, thinking that goes beyond a few seconds of consideration. It may take a few days — even weeks — to not only develop a congruence but to also get familiar and comfortable with the new arrangement once harmony has been found again.

This notion should also make us more sympathetic when trying to explain our positions to others. We cannot expect the acceptance of radical ideas or differing opinions from others so quickly. We should patiently aid them; helping them with the slow process of rearrangement and integration. Proponents of the Socratic method of inquiry sometimes use the term maieutics to describe a similar process. The term maieutics can be rendered as midwifery; in that, we become aids in helping others to birth more meaningful conclusions.

Aiding others in curation, and seeking aid ourselves, are imperatives for healthy civil dialogue and community.

Hoarding and Letting Go

While new objects can be difficult, old objects can be just as troubling. An extreme case of problematic engagement with familiar objects is hoarding.

The DSM-V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) defines hoarding as “Persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of their actual value. This difficulty is due to a perceived need to save the items and to the distress associated with discarding them”. Real fear and anxiety underly the idea of separation between the individual and their possessions, even if the possessions (or the over-accumulation of those possessions) adversely affect the individual’s work, social, or home life.

Even if we aren’t actual hoarders, all of us may feel a degree of unease toward the prospect of selling or disposing of familiar items at some time or another. And a similar sense of unease may accompany the prospect of ridding ourselves of cherished mental concepts.

Although the notion of “idea hoarding” sounds strange, it’s not as uncommon as you might think. For the bulk of our ideas that are inherited from our progenitors and personal community, our connection and adherence to them may not be about their efficacy, but their familiarity or nostalgia. We can attach ourselves to particular ideas, or a particular genre of ideas, eventually breeding such a strong emotional connection with them that any prospect of challenge or dismissal of them is emotionally distressful. Your brain may experience a threat against your body and a threat against your worldview in the same way, meaning hostility towards our ideas can even result in a visceral experience.

As part of the path to healing, hoarders often have to be shown that even if they throw an object away, they remain safe, and the world keeps spinning. Sometimes the same approach has to be done with our thoughts and beliefs. It is common to be resistant to any challenge to our perspectives, but we must remind ourselves that just because an idea is familiar or inherited does not make it helpful or true, and prepare ourselves to let go of harmful perspectives when appropriate.

Not all long-held ideas that we find to be problematic need to be disposed of, however. They may just need to be updated.

The Practice of Restoration

As we begin to curate our interiors, we may find our precious childhood objects or family heirlooms cease to fit the direction and style we’d like our spaces to move towards.

Let’s imagine some old, worn 1940s dining room chairs that you’ve inherited from your grandparents. For years they’ve added a charming character to your interior space, but they suddenly look out of place against some new flooring and cabinetry from a recent kitchen renovation. The intuitive option (admittedly, the easier one) is to throw them out and purchase some new ones.

Another option (a bit more labor intensive) is to restore them. With some cleanup, new upholstery, and a little TLC, we can update our cherished items to be congruent with the new space, while still preserving their charm, presence, and history.

As for our ideas, a large percentage of them — probably larger than most of us realize — have been inherited wholesale; not built from the ground up by our own labor and critical thinking. A majority of these remain serviceable in the here and now. But some of them have lost their integrity after some wear and tear. It is usually only until we are forced to apply these worn ideas to a novel problem that we discover their ineffectiveness.

But just like our out-of-date furniture, not all old ideas that we find to be unfit need to be discarded outright. Ideas can seem antiquated or ineffective, and yet retain the potential to be helpful if labored upon.

The inefficacy of our beliefs or opinions could be due to any number of different factors other than simply being wrong.

For example, the issue may just be aesthetic. Old wisdom can sometimes appear problematic but merely be shrouded in antiquated language that simply needs to be reupholstered in modern vocabulary.

The issue could also be a matter of oversimplification. Some perspectives were appropriate for what was known at the time of their inception, but couldn't anticipate the complexity of the modern day. In which case, the idea may still have a sturdy framework but must be reenvisioned with the nuance necessary for contemporary application.

We should always be prepared to throw old, unhelpful ideas out, but not before we ask ourselves what parts may be worth keeping and merely need to be updated. Old wisdom has stood the test of time for a reason, and learning how to translate older ideas for present-day use is an important skill for us to build.

The Promise and Perils of Flow

When it comes to interior design, there are two different ways of thinking about ‘flow’. So far, we’ve been trying to familiarize ourselves with one form of flow. Namely, the flow of design: Cohesion and harmony within our space, achieved through the proper curation, assessment, and arrangement of our objects.

The other form of flow we must also attend to is the flow of movement: The encouragement of particular behavior guided by the layout of a space and its contents.

Carol Smith of Creative Home Stagers describes “Traffic Flow” as “…crucial when it comes to the layout of a space, and it’s not all about furniture; the way a builder actually configures a room’s walls, windows, and focal points such as fireplaces can actually impact the human flow.” “When it comes to good staging practices, it’s important to visualize how people will move about and use a space to decide how the design should “guide” them through it.”

Every time we enter a new space, we are subtly directed by the objects in the space to hurry through, slow down, or gather in particular areas. For example, smart designers of retail spaces can set the furniture and fixtures up in such a way as to show where the line to the register should be formed without having a “Line Starts Here” sign.

Beyond novel commercial spaces, our familiar domestic spaces also provide a directed flow of movement. I would bet most of us could move through the spaces in our own homes blindfolded. Eventually, we memorize where things are and begin to take the same mini-routes to get from point A to point B. Our layouts — sometimes unbeknownst to us — dictate many of our habitual movements and behaviors.

Flow of movement is something that emerges autonomously — and inevitably — out of our relationship to the particular layout of the space. The key to good design is to make sure the direction that the flow of movement provides leads to the destinations or outcomes that we initially desire. For example, a space that is compartmentalized and fragmented (like a library) might have a flow of movement that encourages solitude and separation. This is an effective layout if we are aiming to make a space for quiet study or private conversation, but an ineffective layout if we are trying to host a large social gathering that brings strangers together. We determine whether the flow of movement a particular space provides is good or bad by analyzing whether or not the human behavior elicited is the behavior we hoped to encourage.

In parallel, our ideological arrangements provide us with a “flow of thought” or habits of mind: Well-traversed cognitive pathways that, like our interior design counterpart, can help us or harm us.

Our mental spaces can be arranged in ways that lead us again and again to familiar conclusions and perspectives. These recurring conclusions can be desirable and helpful, but they can also get in the way of us seeing things for what they are. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (or CBT) — a form of psychotherapy developed in the sixties and still effectively employed today — has done a good job of identifying and providing language for habituality when it comes to our thoughts.

CBT aims to identify our cognitive patterns, evaluate them, and create new ones in place of the distorted ones; with the main assumption being that core perspectives will direct one's thoughts to persistent conclusions — creating a mental flow of movement. If the initial assumptions are distorted, the behavioral consequence will be as well.

One common example of distorted flow is a cognitive habit called “catastrophizing”. This is where an individual’s common path of thinking continually leads them to predict the worst outcomes imaginable for any future actions they might take, often leading to depression or chronic anxiety.

CBT encourages mindfulness to mitigate these psychological spirals. One helpful approach to address catastrophic thinking is creating replacement thoughts and assumptions: Replacing the distorted core beliefs that enable the ‘catastrophizing’ with more healthy and realistic perspectives. To keep with our metaphor, it’s switching out (or around) the furniture to create a different flow, encouraging a different set of movements and eventually different — more realistic — outcomes. In other words, we appraise and rearrange our current perspectives, addressing our distortions and prejudices to ensure a better flow.

Iteration, Iteration, Iteration

The last point to remember is how iterative the design process should be. Over quarantine in 2020–2021, I challenged myself to rearrange my bedroom every couple of months. The room’s footprint was not only small but awkwardly shaped, making it difficult to establish proper flow and harmony. When I first moved into the space in 2019, I could only see two possible orientations that fit everything I desired in my bedroom cohesively. However, by challenging myself to find new arrangements, I discovered an additional ten possible arrangements that worked. Moreover, a few of these new arrangements ended up being more desirable than the first two initially conceived.

In Michelle Bruner’s Washington Post article on decorating like a designer, she concludes with some thoughts on continued experimentation in design: “The final piece of advice from our experts: Don’t ever finish the project — at least not completely. The best rooms aren’t frozen in time; they’re constantly evolving with their inhabitants. “Whether you’re a trained professional or a homeowner who just likes design, no one’s taste stays the same,” says (Richmond designer Janie Molster). “Always leave some space to find that perfect piece of art while traveling or a wonderful tchotchke to occupy an empty spot on your bookshelf.”

Our process of idea curation should be similarly iterative and periodic. Iteration in this respect is important for two reasons: The first is that our solutions and creative ideas seem to improve with time, through the continuation of generating many ideas. This is sometimes referred to as the Extended Effort Principle or the Serial Order Effect in Divergent Thinking. Research in Creative Thinking has found that, when attempting to innovate or seek out new solutions to a given problem, the most creative and meaningful ideas tend to come toward the end of the ideation process rather than the beginning.

The best solutions are not necessarily the first ones that we conceive, so our satisfaction with an early idea or opinion that is “good enough” can cause us to miss out on the more accurate perspectives accessible only to the patient and persistent thinkers. Our initial perspectives about a given topic tend to be quickly derived assumptions, rather than well-thought-through, nuanced conclusions. We are prone to quick judgments and those judgments are often distorted.

While this isn’t necessarily a problem in the short term, assumptions left unchallenged for too long eventually settle in and become an unshakeable reality in our minds — and, like we’ve stated in the above section, a worldview built on haphazard assumptions can lead to larger distorted perspectives and avoidable prejudices.

The second reason iteration is important is the role it plays in maintaining a responsible relationship between us and our modern information ecosystem: the Internet.

Living in the era of the connected web and social media means that we are confronted with an abundance of new data, news, and opinions that shape how we think at every turn — more than any society in the history of our species. Ironically, information overload actually makes us more susceptible to quick judgments, distorted assumptions, conspiratorial thinking, or the severe doubling down on familiar opinions— regardless of their merit.

Constant assailment of the novel, extreme, oversimplified, or sometimes conflicting information on our timeline is similar to waking up to random furniture in your house every morning. In the absence of proper design skills, the management of these new objects can be jarring and quickly lead to disharmony within our space. Periodically sorting through and assessing the information that we receive/conceive with care and wisdom has become paramount given the steady onslaught of data thrown our way. Not only for the sake of our personal well-being but also for maintaining a healthy democracy and social fabric.

The curation and arrangement of both our physical and mental spaces will neither be perfect nor complete. They should instead be fluid, responsive, and continual. By repeating the process over time, we inevitably improve our skills in acquisition, appraisal, layout, etc. Making the overall design of our spaces serve us better with each rendition.

Conclusion

Using these aspects of design as base metaphors for cognition can help us get started in thinking through how opinions or beliefs are developed and entrenched for different people with different headspaces. I hope that this practice allows for a greater sense of empathy and patience toward one another’s perspectives. And that by applying these good design practices to our own mental spaces, we can better alter, evaluate, and develop our views as the complexity of the modern world increases.

Sources:

• “Whiplash”, Joi Ito and Jeff Howe, 2016 — https://shorturl.at/eMOY7

• DSM-V, Hoarding Disorder, National Library of Medicine, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2016 — https://shorturl.at/qxJSV

• “Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services”, National Library of Medicine, Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (US), 2014 — https://shorturl.at/kswF7

• “Treating People With Hoarding Disorder”, American Psychological Association, 2020 — https://shorturl.at/ahjPX

• “What Is Catastrophizing?”, Medical News Today, 2023 — https://shorturl.at/kmJP0

• “Usefulness of the Ideation Principle of Extended Effort in Real World Professional and Managerial Creative Problem Solving”, Min Basadur, Ron Thompson, 1986 — https://shorturl.at/jEPRZ