The research, published in Discover Education, was conducted by Leila Sadat Hamidian Divkolaei of the Technical and Vocational University in Tehran. It asked a deceptively simple question: do high school students respond differently, in emotional and aesthetic terms, to facades whose windows differ only in their geometric proportions? To find out, the study recruited 327 third-grade female high school students in Babol, drawn from three study tracks, mathematics, experimental sciences, and humanities, and from both public and private schools. Participants were selected according to strict criteria, including normal or corrected-to-normal vision and voluntary, informed participation, with written consent obtained from their legal guardians.

The experimental design was carefully controlled. Five facade alternatives were generated from the same base school design, taken from a project under construction by Iran’s School Renovation Organization. Across all five images, the overall building massing, viewpoint, scale, and facade composition were held constant; only the geometry and proportion of the openings varied. The five alternatives comprised a rectangle with proportions of approximately 1.6 to 1, embodying the conventional golden ratio; a golden triangle, an equilateral triangle with an apex angle of 36 degrees; a hexagon, from which the so-called Iranian golden ratio of 1.73 is derived; and two strongly elongated rectangles with 3-to-1 proportions, one horizontal and one vertical. This isolation of a single variable allowed the researchers to attribute differences in emotional response to geometry alone, rather than to materials, color, or form.

Students evaluated the images using a semantic differential questionnaire, a technique that presents bipolar adjective pairs and asks respondents to rate a stimulus between them on a seven-point Likert scale. The 21 attributes spanned several domains: architectural qualities such as beautiful-ugly, traditional-modern, dynamic-static, and light-heavy; educational qualities such as encouraging-discouraging and curious-gloomy; and psychological qualities such as joyful-sad and happy-depressed. The images were projected onto a three-meter screen at a fixed height, and every participant viewed them from a standardized distance of four meters under consistent classroom lighting, with each image displayed for roughly 30 seconds before ratings were completed.

The theoretical scaffolding for the study draws on two complementary strands of environmental aesthetics. The first is processing-fluency theory, which holds that forms the visual system can parse easily, typically coherent and symmetric configurations, tend to be judged more positively. The second encompasses classic environmental-preference models, including the Kaplan and Kaplan preference matrix and Berlyne’s collative-properties framework, which argue that human preference requires a balance between coherence and complexity to avoid monotony. A hexagon, the author argues, occupies an intriguing middle ground: its geometric regularity ensures high perceptual fluency, while its non-orthogonal character introduces a distinctive complexity that pure rectangles lack. In an Iranian cultural context, moreover, repeated historical exposure to hexagon-derived proportions in traditional patterns and spatial modules may lower the cognitive effort needed to process these forms, deepening aesthetic pleasure and emotional comfort.

Because every participant rated all five alternatives, the data were analyzed as repeated measures. Shapiro-Wilk tests revealed that all opening-by-attribute distributions departed significantly from normality, so the researcher employed Friedman tests rather than parametric alternatives, followed by Wilcoxon signed-rank pairwise comparisons with Holm adjustment to control the family-wise error rate. Kendall’s W was reported as the omnibus effect size, and matched-pairs rank-biserial correlations quantified pairwise effects. This nonparametric pipeline reflects a methodological rigor that has often been absent from earlier studies of architectural proportion, many of which relied on small samples and uncorrected comparisons.

The results were striking. On the overall 21-attribute score, the opening geometries differed significantly, with a chi-squared statistic of 104.29 across four degrees of freedom and N equal to 327, Holm-adjusted p below .001, and a Kendall’s W of 0.080. The hexagonal opening achieved the highest overall mean rating of 4.421, followed by the vertical 3:1 rectangle at 3.902, the horizontal 3:1 rectangle at 3.735, the golden triangle at 3.684, and the conventional golden-ratio rectangle at 3.680. In Holm-adjusted pairwise comparisons, the hexagon was rated significantly higher than each of the other four openings, with rank-biserial correlations ranging from .437 to .571. Perhaps most tellingly, the hexagonal opening took the highest mean on 18 of the 21 individual attributes, including beautiful, classy, light, distinctive, harmonic, modern, creative, encouraging, curious, ideal, joyful, peaceful, and memorable. The conventional golden-ratio rectangle led only on three attributes: identified, purity, and safe, where it posted its single strongest mean of 4.575.

Secondary, exploratory analyses added texture to the picture. Comparing public and private school students on the hexagonal opening using Mann-Whitney U tests with Holm correction, five attributes differed significantly, classy, beautiful, harmonic, identified, and safe, with public-school students rating the hexagon higher on all five. Across the three study tracks, only 8 of 105 opening-by-attribute tests remained significant after correction, and no attribute differed by track for the golden-ratio rectangle. Comparisons by height category found no significant differences, while weight categories produced only isolated effects. The author is careful to flag all subgroup findings as exploratory, cautioning that the data do not support prescribing particular geometries for specific school types or student subgroups. Attribute-level effect sizes were mostly small, with Kendall’s W ranging from 0.018 to 0.137, indicating consistent but modest relative differences rather than dramatic swings in sentiment.

Why might the hexagon triumph over the golden ratio rectangle, a proportion long mythologized as the pinnacle of beauty since Gustav Theodor Fechner’s pioneering psychophysical experiments in the nineteenth century? The study situates the answer in both perception and culture. Iranian proportional tradition, exemplified by monuments such as the Taq-i Kisra at Ctesiphon and the Sassanid Palace of Sarvestan, is built on rectangles with ratios of the square root of 2, the square root of 3, and the rarer 1.118, alongside the Peymoun, a measurement system derived from human body proportions. The hexagon, composed of three rectangles each with the 1.73 ratio of the Iranian golden proportion, has historically shaped courtyards, ponds, and the celebrated five-door rooms of traditional Iranian architecture. Prior work cited in the study lends convergent support: research on consumer behavior found hexagonal forms received the highest preference in packaging design, and a Kansei-method study of bank facades found triangular openings received comparatively unfavorable emotional ratings, echoing the golden triangle’s middling performance here.

The author is candid about the study’s limits. The sample came from a single city, a single grade, and female students only, restricting generalizability, and some adjective sets showed low internal consistency, particularly within the ethical-identity and two-item spiritual categories. Crucially, the study measures self-reported aesthetic and emotional responses to static facade images, not learning outcomes, behavior, motivation, or well-being, and the author explicitly warns against inferring such outcomes from these results. Still, the design implications are clear. Within this sample, the hexagonal opening emerges as the strongest candidate for user-centered facade development, though any final choice must weigh daylighting, privacy, energy performance, constructability, cost, and cultural context. Future directions include extending the approach to other facade parameters and interior spaces, replicating with broader and more diverse samples, complementing self-report with physiological measures such as eye-tracking or EEG, and testing longitudinally whether aesthetic preference translates into tangible benefits. For now, the message for architects and school planners is quietly provocative: the shapes we cut into a wall may speak to students more powerfully than we assumed, and the oldest proportional wisdom of Persian architecture may deserve a seat at the drafting table alongside the golden ratio.

Subject of Research: Emotional and aesthetic responses of high school students to school facade opening geometries based on the golden ratio and Iranian proportional systems

Article Title: Emotional responses to school façade opening geometries associated with the golden ratio among high school girls in Babol, Iran

Article References: Divkolaei, L. S. H. (2026). Emotional responses to school façade opening geometries associated with the golden ratio among high school girls in Babol, Iran. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1140. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02143-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02143-z

Keywords: golden ratio, hexagonal openings, school facade design, environmental psychology, processing fluency, semantic differential, Iranian architecture, aesthetic preference, emotional response, architectural geometry, user-centered design, high school students

The project is led on the UT side by Jon Hathaway, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering who also serves as an associate director of the Tennessee Water Resources Research Center. Hathaway will steer the university’s involvement through the Institute for a Secure & Sustainable Environment, a research institute focused on sustainability challenges. Alongside him, Catherine Schuman, an assistant professor in the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, brings expertise in optimization algorithms and user-interface development, two disciplines that sit at the computational heart of any system attempting to orchestrate dozens of distributed growing sites in real time.

The interdisciplinary roster does not stop there. Natalie Bumgarner, an associate professor of plant sciences in the Hebert College of Agriculture, and George Hope Chidziwisano, an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences, round out the co-principal investigators. This combination is deliberate. Optimizing a community food network is not purely a software problem or purely an agricultural one; it requires understanding how plants respond to nutrient solutions, how sensors behave in humid growing environments, how interfaces communicate with growers who may have widely varying levels of technical experience, and how information flows between community organizations such as food pantries.

At its core, DFARM will employ a user-centered software platform designed to connect community gardens, indoor hydroponic systems, and local food hubs into a single coordinated network. The platform’s purpose is logistical intelligence: matching production capacity with demand, coordinating planting schedules across sites, and routing harvests to the organizations that need them most, including community food pantries. In an era when food insecurity and supply chain fragility have moved from abstract concerns to lived realities for many communities, the appeal of a locally controlled, digitally coordinated production system is easy to understand.

A major component of the buildout involves hardware as well as software. The team intends to purchase 30 new hydroponic systems, soil-free growing units that deliver water, oxygen, and essential materials directly to plant roots through a nutrient-rich water solution. Hydroponics has long been celebrated for its efficiency: because nutrients are delivered precisely and water can be recirculated, these systems can support food production year-round, independent of weather, and can expand growing capacity into locations where traditional garden space simply is not available. Rooftops, warehouses, community centers, and other unconventional spaces become viable production sites once soil is removed from the equation.

The technical challenge the UT researchers have set for themselves is determining exactly how much technological support is needed to make such systems succeed. Hathaway’s own work will focus on hydroponic sensing and connectivity, investigating the spectrum between minimal and maximal automation. At one end of that spectrum sit systems with no automated monitoring at all, where growers must check conditions manually. At the other end are fully instrumented platforms that display system conditions on a dashboard and issue alerts when something needs attention. Finding the right level of support for each growing context is a genuine research question, not a settled engineering decision.

The sensing technology itself will monitor three critical parameters within the hydroponic systems: water depth, electrical conductivity, and pH. Each of these matters enormously to plant health. Water depth determines whether roots have adequate access to the nutrient solution; conductivity provides a proxy for the concentration of dissolved nutrients available to the plants; and pH governs whether those nutrients can actually be absorbed, since even a perfectly balanced solution becomes unusable to plants if acidity drifts outside a viable range. From these sensors, data can be transferred for processing, allowing the system to notify growers when intervention is needed, either through the DFARM application or via a simple text message.

That last detail, the text message option, reflects the user-centered philosophy that runs through the entire project. Schuman and Chidziwisano’s contributions on interface design and information science are aimed at ensuring the platform meets growers where they are, rather than demanding that community volunteers become systems administrators. The broader UT team, whose expertise spans optimization algorithms, user-interface development, plant science, nutrition, and sensor technology, will develop these tools collaboratively, and UT graduate and undergraduate students will be embedded in the work, contributing to the algorithms, interfaces, and sensing systems as part of their training.

Hathaway has framed the effort as a textbook case of use-inspired research, the mode of inquiry in which fundamental scientific questions are pursued in direct service of real-world challenges. In his words, the project allows researchers to contribute to fundamental developments in their own fields while simultaneously addressing practical problems. Schuman echoed that sentiment, expressing enthusiasm for work that supports interdisciplinary research on a real-world problem and connects solutions to members of the broader community who stand to benefit most. That orientation, toward community benefit as a design requirement rather than an afterthought, distinguishes DFARM from purely laboratory-bound automation research.

Beyond its immediate goals of increasing local food production capacity and streamlining distribution, the project carries a larger ambition: to create a model that other communities could eventually adapt for their own needs. If the Knoxville network demonstrates that a modest fleet of instrumented hydroponic units, a handful of community gardens, and a coordinating software platform can meaningfully expand access to fresh, locally grown food, the blueprint becomes replicable. The nearly $1 million NSF investment reflects the agency’s growing interest in research that bridges engineering, agriculture, and community infrastructure, and the DFARM team’s results will be watched closely by anyone interested in whether smart, connected food systems can move from promising concept to everyday practice.

Subject of Research: An NSF-funded smart, connected community food production and distribution system using hydroponics, sensing, and optimization software

Article Title: University of Tennessee researchers join nearly $1 million project to build local smart food production network

Article References: University of Tennessee researchers join nearly $1 million project to build local smart food production network. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: hydroponics, local food systems, National Science Foundation, sensors, food security, optimization algorithms, user-centered design, community gardens, sustainable agriculture, University of Tennessee, food distribution, interdisciplinary research

Unlike clinical depression or generalized anxiety, diabetes distress is a condition-specific phenomenon: a predictable, near-constant response to the relentless cognitive, emotional and logistical demands of keeping a failing pancreas artificially alive. Researchers have long known that this distress is common among adults with type 1 diabetes and is linked to worse self-management, poorer glycemic outcomes and reduced quality of life. What has remained murky is how that distress is actually experienced at different stages of adult life—a gap the new study set out to close by listening directly to patients rather than measuring them with questionnaires.

The research team, led by investigators at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, used a user-centered design approach, a methodology borrowed from product development that treats patients as genuine stakeholders rather than passive subjects. Nineteen adults with type 1 diabetes took part in six virtual workshops, each lasting about 90 minutes and facilitated by a clinical psychologist. Four sessions were devoted to young adults aged 18 to 34, whose mean age was 23.8 years, and two sessions gathered adults aged 35 to 64. The younger group was notably diverse, with nearly 43 percent identifying as Hispanic or Latino and another 43 percent as Black or African American, while the older group comprised five women recruited through a national patient advocacy council. Sessions were audio-recorded, professionally transcribed and analyzed with an inductive coding process in NVivo, with two analysts independently developing the framework and an audit trail maintained throughout to document every analytic decision.

The first and perhaps most striking finding is how much the two age groups share. Participants across the board identified competing daily priorities as a central driver of distress, alongside the financial and insurance-related friction of obtaining supplies and medications. The burden, participants stressed, was not merely economic. Navigating prior authorizations, recurring administrative hurdles and coverage disputes exacted its own emotional toll. Interpersonal strain surfaced in both groups as well—professional relationships, friendships and family dynamics all reshaped by the visibility of the disease, the sense of being misunderstood, and the exhausting need to repeatedly explain or justify diabetes-related needs. Encounters with the healthcare system emerged as another shared sore point, with participants describing feelings of judgment, frustration and a sense that their emotional well-being was treated as an afterthought to glucose metrics.

Where the groups diverged was in the temporal framing of their suffering. Young adults described distress as immediate and intrusive, a constant background presence that shaped everyday decisions and interfered with the developmental work of establishing independence and identity. Rather than a series of discrete tasks, diabetes was portrayed as an uninvited companion at work, in school and in social settings. Participants admitted to silencing alarms, delaying treatment or hiding their care during meetings to avoid disruption or unwanted attention. Technology figured prominently in this age group’s distress: device malfunctions, alarm fatigue and the sheer visibility of continuous glucose monitors and pumps contributed to feelings of stigma and of being marked as different from peers, sometimes pushing participants toward disengagement from self-care altogether.

Adults aged 35 to 64 told a strikingly different story. For them, distress was cumulative and future-oriented, shaped by decades of unbroken disease management, the accumulation of co-existing medical conditions and mounting anxieties about sustaining care into retirement. Many reflected on how their distress had evolved over the years, with self-management increasingly intertwined with family responsibilities, caregiving demands and long-term financial planning. The fear of complications and the physical wear and tear of long-standing diabetes loomed large. Clinical visits were frequently described as judgment-laden experiences—one participant compared meeting with the endocrinologist to sitting in the principal’s office—while the financial arithmetic of survival was expressed with bleak candor: the amount spent to stay alive, one participant noted, could have bought a house.

Across both groups, participants consistently distinguished diabetes distress from depression and anxiety, framing it instead as an expected reaction to a complex, lifelong condition. One participant captured the pervasiveness of the phenomenon by observing that almost everything a person with type 1 diabetes goes through has the potential to cause distress, from difficulty obtaining supplies to navigating insurance requirements to accessing timely care. The cognitive load was a recurring motif: young adults spoke of working hard simply to stay alive, while older participants tallied the extra hundreds of decisions the disease forces into each day. Taken together, the narratives suggest that diabetes distress arises not from any isolated task but from the cumulative challenge of integrating relentless disease management into the competing demands of ordinary life.

The study’s findings carry direct consequences for how psychological interventions are built. Core strategies—emotional validation, cognitive restructuring and problem-solving—appear broadly relevant across age groups, but the researchers argue that content and emphasis should be tuned to life-stage-specific stressors. The workshops directly informed the refinement of the Reduce intervention, a cognitive-behavioral program being developed within two ongoing randomized controlled trials. For young adults, that means addressing technology fatigue, competing priorities and identity-related concerns; for the older group, it means emphasizing cumulative burden, caregiving responsibilities and long-term planning. The authors also flag implications for routine clinical screening, suggesting that standard questionnaires may underestimate distress when they focus narrowly on emotional symptoms while ignoring contextual stressors such as cost, caregiving or technology burden. Brief, open-ended questions in routine encounters, paired with clinician training in empathetic, non-punitive communication, could improve detection of distress that is situational, cumulative or anticipatory in nature.

There are limits worth noting. The sample was small, workshop sizes shrank below their intended scale because of scheduling constraints, and every participant in the 35-to-64 group was female, which may constrain transferability to men of the same age. No validated distress instrument was administered, so severity cannot be benchmarked against established clinical thresholds, and recruitment from clinics and advocacy organizations likely captured people already engaged in care. Older adults aged 65 and beyond were outside the study’s scope and remain an important frontier, as aging with type 1 diabetes introduces clinical and psychosocial challenges of its own. Future work, the authors suggest, should examine distress longitudinally, stratify analyses by age and disease duration, and include more racially, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse populations, given well-documented disparities in outcomes and access.

What the study ultimately delivers is a conceptual upgrade: diabetes distress, long treated as a static psychological state, emerges instead as a dynamic, developmental and profoundly systemic experience—one shaped as much by insurance bureaucracy, algorithmic alarms and the architecture of clinical encounters as by individual coping. For a condition that demands vigilance every waking hour, recognizing that the meaning of that vigilance changes across a lifetime may be the first step toward support that people actually find worth using.

Subject of Research: Life stage differences in diabetes distress among adults with type 1 diabetes explored through user-centered design workshops

Article Title: Understanding Diabetes Distress Across Adulthood in Type 1 Diabetes: A User‐Centered Design Study

Article References: Rayden, R., Crespo‐Ramos, G., Finnan, M., Hoogendoorn, C., Farchione, T., & Gonzalez, J. S. (2026). Understanding Diabetes Distress Across Adulthood in Type 1 Diabetes: A User‐Centered Design Study. Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism, 9(5), Article e70331. https://doi.org/10.1002/edm2.70331

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/edm2.70331

Keywords: type 1 diabetes, diabetes distress, user-centered design, mental health, young adults, aging, cognitive-behavioral intervention, healthcare burden, insurance barriers, diabetes technology, qualitative research, psychosocial care