I have now had a few years of experience doing architectural and interior design for many spaces that people seem to really love (most widely known Lighthaven, but before that we also had the Lightcone Offices, though I've also played a hand in designing some of the most popular areas at Constellation a few years back).

Most people (including me a few years back) have surprisingly bad introspective access into why a room makes them feel certain things. Most of the time, people's ability to describe the effect of a space on them is as shallow as "this place feels artificial", or "this place has bad vibes", or "this place feels cozy". And if they try to figure out why that is true, they quickly run into limits of their introspective access.

The most common reason why a space feels bad, is because it is lit by low-quality lights.

Our eyes evolved to see things illuminated by sunlight. Correspondingly, it appears that the best proxy we have for whether the light in a room "works" is how similar the light in that room is to natural sunlight. The most popular way of measuring how much light differs from [...]

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
April 19th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dWib7qinqymfxevE4/feel-like-a-room-has-bad-vibes-the-lighting-is-probably-too

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Feel like a room has bad vibes? The lighting is probably too “spiky” or too blue” by habryka

LessWrong (30+ Karma)