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Sound Without Walls – Considering room acoustics in hospitals as an integral aspect of biophilic design

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Sound Without Walls – Considering room acoustics in hospitals as an integral aspect of biophilic design

Sound may not be one of the first things we think of in biophilic design but what most people want from the auditory environment is intrinsically linked to nature.

Our hearing is often key in our perception of the world around us; it helps us to interact, communicate and be aware of what is happening and impending change. It is designed for the outside, a world without walls and other hard reflective surfaces that focus sound and allow it to build up to levels where it affects our concentration, increases levels of anxiety, negatively affects performance and interrupts our sleep….

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Shinrin-yoku - Forest Bathing

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Shinrin-yoku - Forest Bathing

By 2050, the United Nations states that 75% of the world’s projected 9 billion population will live in cities. So, is it so surprising that as a species we have become disconnected from nature…and forests, in particular, where we have lived for most of our life on earth? We are also, increasingly an indoor species. The World Health Organisation names stress as the health epidemic of the 21st century. Since its inception in Japanese culture in the 1980’s, Shinrin-yoku, meaning ‘Forest bath’, has proven to affect health and wellbeing beneficially in a myriad of ways. Forest Bathing/Shinrin-yoku - a Japanese practice reconnecting people with nature, alleviating effects of stress and burnout, developed in the 1980s during tech boom. Research into the practice has continued since then, and expanded worldwide…

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We Are Who We Were

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We Are Who We Were

Many things have changed for humans since their early days as a species—how excited do you think early Homo sapiens would have been by heating, air conditioning and weather tight structures to install them in, for example?

Not everything is different, however. We still have fundamentally the same brains as the first creatures we would recognize as “one of us.” That means we process and respond to the basic sensory inputs we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell today as our earliest human ancestors did….

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