Designing for Mental Health – The Long Read

Every day is not a good day, no matter what colour you paint the walls in your office and regardless of the pattern and texture of your entryway rug.  The design of the places where you spend your time can, however, elevate your mental health and wellbeing when you know how to use it to your advantage, when you put design-related science to work.

In this article we’ll cover things you can do to give your own mental health, and the mental health of those you share space with, a smoother path to higher ground:

• Make sure you and other users have options. Create a place where you and all the other people in a space can make some choices, reasonable, meaningful ones, about how to spend your time.  Will you work at your designated workspace or on the patio with the view of the pond?  With the windows open or closed?  With the lights on full strength or reduced to a golden twinkle?  While sitting on a sofa or in an Aeron chair?  We need to be able to make choices—the reward centres in our mind light up even when we just consider making some sort of selection.  We feel best when we have what our brains consider a reasonably sized set of alternatives—usually 4 to 6 – so we get a much bigger positive charge to our wellbeing when we pick a lighting colour and intensity combination option from one of four presets presented (say the one for “concentration”) than we do from spinning one dial through nearly endless light colour options and another dial through numberless light intensity choices.  The alternatives provided to people should be consistent with how they’re likely to use a place or an object.  In a snug where you intend to relax and revitalize, having lighting options that support doing high-powered focused work is probably just not worth the effort, for instance.
• When people have a comfortable amount of control over their worlds they also usually have a territory that they control as well as privacy when they want it—territories and privacy are so important that they need to be broken out separately and discussed on their own.“Having a territory” seems like something that would be significant to a monkey or a lizard and not to a human being, but territories are as important for human wellbeing and mental health as they are to the happiness of our fellow animals. A territory is a space that seems to belong to a person or a well-defined group, such as a family.  In that space they can show off who they are and what’s important to them and live as they find comfortable.  In a public space a territory can be a defined by a table beside a chair where someone can put down their cup of coffee and purse.  Public space displays of personality, values, etc., are often confined to clothes being worn.  In less public spaces a territory can be a snug or a bedroom, where an individual can signal ownership not only by placing their name on the door, but also by customizing with art, photos indicating social connections, reminders of important life events (for example, diplomas), gizmos and doo-dads needed for hobbies, and other furnishings that convey a sense of style or send some message that the space owner wants to hear, or wants others to hear.  We’re likely to have the same territory for a long time, as long as we live in a particular house (or our parents do), for instance.  Just as we all need a territory, we all need privacy from time-to-time, whenever we feel that it is required—and just like a few people can share a territory, a few people can experience privacy together, at the same time and in the same place.  Among other things, we use our private times to think about and make sense of events in our lives and when we don’t have privacy when we feel we need it, our brains start to perform badly, they start to act up like a stereo with a skipping record.  When we have privacy, we don’t see or hear other people we don’t want to see and hear  and other people can’t see or hear us (unless we want them to) and we have the control needed to preserve this acoustic and visual isolation until we choose to end it—so we have privacy in a powder room with a solid, no-see-in door and in a yurt we put up in the middle of a field, but not in a high-backed chair that anyone who wants to can walk around to greet us face-to-face (even though we are deep in thought).  We regularly have privacy in our territories but spaces where we have privacy are not necessarily our territories, at least not for more than a few moments at a time.
• Humans are very attentive to any messages being sent by the environments in which they find themselves.No, this doesn’t mean that they’re listening to messages aliens are trying to communicate through vibrating cutlery or anything like that.  What it does mean is that humans are always looking for cues about what is important to other people, what they value, what they’ve accomplished, and that Homo Sapiens search for the cues that they analyze in design choices made.  Is the photo on that coffee table of a wild night out during college or of a son or daughter in a hockey league uniform?  Is grandmother’s china on the sideboard or some Avant Garde pottery made by the owner of that sideboard?  Is the place more or less picked up, vacuumed, and neat or more accurately described as “dishevelled”?  In a place where our mental health is good, the design messages we’re sending are the ones we want others to “hear,” all while we pick up the sorts of messages about ourselves that make us feel good, that help us maintain our self-respect.

• People are a social species and just as nonverbal messages sent and received need to be positive (at least in the mind of the “beholder”), people need to be able to talk to each other, with actual spoken words, when desired—design that supports good discussions also supports good mental health. Designing to support the best sorts of conversations is discussed in this article   https://thespacedoctors.com/index.php/2022/12/01/planning-for-pleasant-conversations/.  A few highlights of the linked-to article: for the very best discussions people all need to be sitting on chairs whose legs the same length (no one perched on a stool while others luxuriate on a sofa) or on the floor.  There needs to be something roughly towards the centre of a ring of people talking (say diners seated around a dining table) that people can gracefully divert their eyes to from time-to-time when they need an eye contact break, and eye contact breaks are needed during even the most pleasant and upbeat of conversations.  An example:  no one feels upset when someone else’s eyes occasionally travel to a good-sized Ficus plant or a jumbo aquarium (or even a petit fish bowl that contains a single fish).  Also, pluses for discussions with others:  warm colours on walls and other surfaces (although people in spaces where cooler colours prevail seem more powerful and competent and do actually feel more powerful) and spaces that smell clean or like orange, like lemon, or like lavender.  Sitting on a cushioned surface (even a 1-inch-deep cushion will do) also makes it more likely that people will interact pleasantly and so does making the lights a little dimmer and warmer than usual.
• Spaces where our mental health is better are fundamentally familiar to other places where we’ve been in the past—but that doesn’t mean that they’re identical to areas we’ve spent time before. They do have to be enough the same so we understand how to use them—we expect somewhere comfortable to sleep in a bedroom and to sit in a living room.  We need to be able to cook in kitchens and clean ourselves up in bathrooms.  “Pish” you may say, of course you can always figure out how to turn on a bathroom shower or a kitchen stove—but the designed world is flooded with examples of situations in which what should be obvious and possible is really not at all.
• Nothing makes us unhappy and stressed quite as fast as trying to get something done and failing because there’s something amiss with the place where we find ourselves—a kitchen where the stove doesn’t work properly, an office where we can’t concentrate, a bedroom where we don’t fall asleep. The Space Doctors regularly talks about how you can align design with planned/desired situations/activities, for example, in this article https://thespacedoctors.com/index.php/2022/10/31/designing-for-sleeping-zzzzzz/ about creating a bedroom where sleep arrives even before the sheep for counting.
• After all that doing whatever we need or want to do our brains inevitably get tired and we become unpleasant, low-performing grumps. When we have tired brains our mental health hits its lowest levels.  To mentally refresh fast we can look at plants or visual art/photographs that present nature scenes at least somewhat realistically inside or water features (real or manmade) and landscapes outdoors through windows.  For more on mental refreshment, read this article.  https://thespacedoctors.com/index.php/2021/11/30/refreshment-time/ One of the single best things you can do to improve your mental health is to spend some time in nature, whether that nature is wild acreage in a national park or a sunny spot on a patio in the midst of two or three good sized green leafy plants.
• If you’re at a loss as to what else can help with your mental health, run through the lists in your mind about colours and scents you prefer, furniture styles you enjoy seeing, and place layouts you find logical or fun. All else being equal, going with an option you just plain prefer is likely to boost your mood and that’s wonderful for your mental health.