Boosting Physical Health, Via Place Design

The most obvious ways that design can improve physical health is by not actively harming users—off gassing fatal to inhale chemicals, being appropriate ergonomically, etc.

Once all of the active threats are eliminated from a space (the flow of dangerous fumes is stopped, the ergonomic chair is assembled and wheeled into place, etc.) there are other things that design can do to improve our physical health.

It can keep our stress levels in check.

When our stress levels go down, our physical health improves basically because life gets easier for our bodies—they’re not spending so much energy pumping our blood from place to place at high pressure, for instance, and our immune systems function more effectively, for instance.

As you can imagine there are so, so many ways that design can add, or subtract stress from our lives.

Experiences that compromise our mental health, discussed in the last article, are also bad for our stress levels.

The way that the physical environment is most likely to stress us is by not aligning with whatever we’ve planned.  Offices where we can’t focus to do the work we need to get done, kitchens where creating the meals we’ve planned is just not going to happen, spaces where we have to modify our preferred daily routines, make us feel stressed.  The single most unhealthy thing that design can do is prevent us from sleeping, when we’re not able to sleep all, it seems, of our bodily systems are adversely affected. Creating places where people fall asleep more quickly and sleep more deeply is discussed here.  Circadian lighting and using glare-free natural light in a space (and glare falls when, for example, whatever we’re reading such as a computer screen, is at an angle to the light source) can help us fall asleep at an appropriate time and to sleep well.

Some of the ways that we want, or feel we need, to use spaces are determined by us, alone and others are determined by our culture.  When a space doesn’t align with our culture, because we’re living in a space where we didn’t grow up, for instance, we will experience stress.

How does the culture of the place where we grew up influence our experience of design?

In lots of ways.  Let’s just discuss individualism and collectivism today.  Most people have an inkling of whether their first culture is relatively more individualistic or collectivistic.  People from more individualistic cultures expect to have more privacy, are not as good at sharing resources, and are more likely to try to change their world (to move the furniture, for example) than people born into more collectivistic societies.  Just think about how having to share (a bathroom or an office) when you’re not so keen on it might do to your blood pressure, for instance.

A space that makes it difficult to live as people with our personality prefer is also stress-inducing.  How design can support personality is discussed in this article.  and search for “personality” in the search bar top right.

A place that’s fundamentally familiar is one where our stress levels are likely to be lower, because, basically, we understand how to use it.  A place that’s familiar can certainly have its own design twists, and monotony is its own sort of stressor.  “Familiar” in this context means conforming to the very most basic rules for a certain sort of place or thing.  Many of us are used to the bathing areas in our homes being places where we have some visual privacy, at least when we want it, for instance, and if we move into a house and that’s not the case, we might initially be stressed, although humans are resourceful and we would, undoubtably, eventually come up with a set of space modifications that makes us feel comfortable.

Biophilic Design and Health

Biophilic design keeps stress levels low, and it’s reviewed in these articles (and search for Biophilic Design in the search bar top right)

Health foods and feeling physically fit

Many of us want to eat healthy foods and design can make it more or less likely that we’ll do that, as The Space Doctors article here LINK makes clear.  Design can even influence what things taste like, which will certainly affect what we’ll eat.  A straightforward example: researchers poured the same chocolate mixture into two different chocolate bar moulds, ones with sharp, right-angle corners and another with rounded ones.  When study participants tasted the chocolate from the more angular moulds, they found it more bitter, not as sweet as the chocolate from the rounded ones.  We also tend to eat less in less chaotic and cluttered places.  We feel more positively about healthy foods when we can hear nature sounds (burbling brooks, gently rustling leaves and grasses, etc.) than we do about unhealthy ones—and these are the same sorts of sounds that cut our stress levels generally.  Even what we’re listening to influences what we eat—read the linked to article for more details.

Just as lots of us want to eat healthy foods, many of us want to be more active physically.  Sit-stand desks can help with that.  Standing while working makes us use our leg muscles when we otherwise wouldn’t be, which has all sorts of pluses for our circulation, for instance.

Designing in lower stress levels improves our physical health, as does encouraging healthy eating and sleeping and increased activity levels and creating fundamentally familiar biophilic spaces that improve our mental health.  Neuroscience informed design can be as good for our physical health as it is for our mental state.