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Oliver Heath - How to create Happiness, the benefits of Biophilic Design

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Oliver Heath - How to create Happiness, the benefits of Biophilic Design

Biophilic design principles allow us to bring elements of nature into the built environment, especially into those places where we experience a great deal of stress. Our connection to nature can unlock so many benefits, stress washes off us, we become different people, we can think more holistically about our life and where it’s going. The impact the buildings we inhabit and work in have an enormous effect on our lives, especially now with the restrictions placed on us as a result of the Covid epidemic. With an onset of almost cabin fever, we are recognising the fact that the building we surround ourselves with has a huge impact on our physical, mental and emotional states. Nature can play a valuable role, the benefits of plants and greenery, adding personalisation, direct influence over a space, improve air quality, sunlight, fresh air, easy to improve spaces. S..

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The New Workplace - how to use Biophilic Design

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The New Workplace - how to use Biophilic Design

The New Workplace - The office is going to be very different in the future, less about ‘The’ place where you go to do work, it may be more the place where you go to be creative and collaborative. Offices may be used for the more social aspects of work, or those times where you genuinely need to cooperate or collaborate face-to-face. No longer will they be the battery farms of the past. As we emerge from Lockdown things are changing already in the way people work, where they work and the office environments themselves. We speak to Kenneth Freeman, former Head of Innovation at Ambius who has now set up his own consultancy focusing on workplace wellbeing through biophilic design, to ask him how he thinks biophilic design should be used going forward to make workers lives better, not just in the office itself but also at home.

Re-humanising and inspiring the Workplace - For Kenneth, with his background in horticulture, evaluating the effects of biophilic design is essential, helping understand scientifically how and why nature and plants at work really makes a difference to us. Through surveys, pre- and post-occupancy, as well as encouraging companies to engage their staff in the consultation process, Kenneth says this always helps shape the design of a space to make a positive impact on staff morale, communication and also helps acceptance of change. Essential in times like these.

How to use Biophilic Design - How should we decorate our offices and enrich our workspaces? What does a healthy workplace really mean? Why put plants into buildings? What about Home Offices? Should companies be supporting their staff working from home with Biophilic Design enhancement to help wellbeing and productivity? Kenneth answers these questions and more with examples of where biophilic design AND staff engagement has really made a difference.

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One and the Same? Feng Shui and Biophilic Design

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One and the Same? Feng Shui and Biophilic Design

To Luminous Spaces founder, Maureen Calamia, Feng Shui and Biophilic Design are two expressions of the same concept, in many ways Biophilic Design is a modern take on Feng Shui. Both advocate using live plants, natural materials, natural light. Feng Shui is more intuitive, it’s an art and feeling, Biophilic Design is more scientific and based on research, but Biophilic Design also comes from an intuitive knowing that we are not separate from nature and when we put ourselves in spaces devoid of nature we don’t feel good.

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Why Biophilic Design should be essential in Healthcare

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Why Biophilic Design should be essential in Healthcare

Maggie’s Cancer Care Centres have embraced and celebrated biophilic design not only in their interiors but also in the fabric of the architecture, the landscapes and views of nature, plants and trees within and without their buildings. And it is making a phenomenal difference. As the seasons change, so the views change. “Nature is Joyful, and it helps us feel joyful and when we feel joyful we can handle so much more of what life throws at us.” Maggie’s is visionary, it’s mould-breaking and is important evidence that biophilic design is ESSENTIAL in healthcare….

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How a NASA Study led to "Forest Air"

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How a NASA Study led to "Forest Air"

In 1986 NASA was researching the ability of plants to absorb harmful gases. Their research had a huge impact on author and precision mechanic Jørn Viumdal who went on to set up Greentime AS. He contacted NASA and they began to develop the space stations of the future and researched how they could use nature to improve the air quality on board the space stations…

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What do Biophilic Design, Feng Shui and Wabi Sabi have in common?

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What do Biophilic Design, Feng Shui and Wabi Sabi have in common?

Acoustics, planting, colour ways, furniture design, textures, space all have an impact on us. Whether this is at home or in the workplace, how we decide to design these spaces can make a whole difference to our mind set, they can make us stressed and unproductive or they can make us focussed, calm and inspired. We have control on what we create. We have a duty of care to ourselves to make sure we respect each other enough to want to make our homes and offices, hospitals and so on nice places to be…

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6 Things to Know about Biophilic Design Today

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6 Things to Know about Biophilic Design Today

Will landscaped offices be the thing of the future? Will office spaces and homes merge into one? Why should learning environments like schools really need to take note and incorporate biophilic design elements into classrooms and buildings? Maggie Procopi is co-founder and owner of popular Workplace Trends series of conferences held in London, Madrid, Delhi and elsewhere as well as online, our editor Vanessa Champion asks her opinion on current trends, pets, how biophilic design isn’t just plants, how to embrace circadian rhythms and just what exactly is grounding?!

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Moveable sanctuaries…

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Moveable sanctuaries…

Ever wanted a quiet space in the office to hanker down and focus? If you work from home, how about having a MOVEABLE seated pod that has adjustable lighting, great sound proofing and even your kids can use for homework? Using some of the main biophilic design elements,…

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Moodsonic - breaking the silence

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Moodsonic - breaking the silence

We work so hard to make our working, home and leisure environments acoustically better that we may be overlooking an essential aspect, our need for “sound”, our need especially for the “sound of nature”. Back in the office many of us work in cacophony or we are discovering during this “lockdown” that we live in homes where the TV is too loud, our hospitals are often crazy busy noisy environments, everywhere designers are struggling to clean these spaces of aggressive and distracting audio disturbance, but once we do that, how do we know that these spaces provide us with the optimum environments for focus, creativity and wellbeing? …

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Room by Room Makeover using Biophilic Design

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Room by Room Makeover using Biophilic Design

The world is in Lockdown, we are all probably going a little stir-crazy, looking at the same four walls and thinking that some of our rooms are driving us nuts and we’re not quite sure why…

How can we use colour, light, sound and biophilia to improve our homes when we can’t get out to buy the things we would like to make or homes really cool places, but don’t despair, using clever, simple and quick fixes we can make our spaces great spaces to be in.

We speak with Sally Augustin environmental psychologist and author of Designology about how we can improve our home space room by room while we are in lockdown during the Covid 19 period.

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5 Fixes to Improve Working From Home

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5 Fixes to Improve Working From Home

If you are working from home for the first time during this Covid 19 Lockdown, or maybe you have always worked from home, there are some simple biophilic design “tweaks” you can do to really improve your workspace. From clearing clutter, to your lights, nature views, air quality and even sounds to improve your space, help you focus more, be less stressed, be creative and productive too. We speak to Sally Augustin, author of the great book “Designology” to find out what we can each do right now without having to go out or take up too much time out of our day.

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Environmental Psychology - We are who we were

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Environmental Psychology - 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.

Neuroscience research suggests that those sensory consistencies may be why biophilic design gives us such a powerful mental boost today. Biophilic design applies the same sorts of design principles in today’s built-environments that were naturally present in the outdoor settings where we were at ease aeons ago, when our bodies took on their current form. We still feel comfortable in biophilic spaces today, and the sorts of experiences that we have in biophilicly designed spaces boost our cognitive performance, for example, and for some of us even enhance the performance of our immune systems.

Our brains continue to respond positively to the sorts of sensory stimulations that long ago signalled good times, or at least that bad times were unlikely.

So, what are the principles of biophilic design?

In a biophilic space, there is moderate visual complexity. This means that there is order in the world around us, and a carefully edited palette of colours and shapes in play. Moderate visual complexity makes it less stressful for us to continuously scan the world around us—something we still do without considering what we’re up to today, just as our forebears did aeons ago to determine if there was danger nearby. Clutter creates high visual complexity, which is why it makes us tense.

We speak with Environmental and Design Psychologist, Sally Augustin. Sally is also Principal at ‘Design with Science’. She is also Fellow of the ‘American Psychological Association’ and author of “Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture” (Wiley 2009) and with Cindy Coleman, “The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design” (Wiley, 2012).

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