100 Things: Every Designer Needs to Know About People

78. Pastoral Scenes Make People Happy

Walk into any hotel, house, office building, museum, art gallery, or other place where there are paintings or photographs hanging on the wall, and chances are that you’ll see a picture that looks something like Figure 78.1.

Figure 78.1. Pastoral scenes are part of our evolution.

(Evening at the River by Stanislav Pobytov.)

According to Denis Dutton, a philosopher and the author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, you’ll often see these types of images because we’re drawn to them due to evolution during the Pleistocene era. (See Dutton’s TED talk at http://bit.ly/cIj9uo.) Dutton notes ...