As a child, I abhorred going to the hospital. The cold, impersonal nature of the facility made me feel small. The piercing fluorescent lights amplified my eery feelings and attested to an uncomfortable sensation of sterility. But my experiences visiting newer healthcare facilities that adopted principles of biophilic design have changed my view entirely. A world of difference exists between my memory of the old children’s hospital, for example, and the personable, naturally lit, green space that is the new clinic I’ve since visited. My first real experience with biophilic design in a healthcare setting sparked a deep interest in the forces at work behind this phenomenon, so much so that I’ve made it the focus of my academic research.
The biophilic design incorporates natural elements into constructed environments, creating spaces that are not just functional but also good for the people who inhabit them. This is especially important for those who dwell in healthcare facilities, where the salutary effects of biophilic design work directly on patients, providing them with the environments conducive to healing. Biophilic design is good for the economy as well, making all kinds of financial sense. It does this by intertwining three types of value: direct value, indirect value, and the very important third way—healthcare.
For centuries, the link between nature and health has been well known and respected. The concept is simple: people just feel better when they’re around nature. Biophilic designers tap this knowledge when they create atmospheres in medical buildings. Physical plants, water features, sunlight or representations thereof, and natural materials like wood and stone all help to form environments that feel good when you’re in them, hospitals where you have the right not to feel like a nervous wreck, and serious upticks in calm and well-being for the people who are stuck there.
Biophilic design’s considerable advantage in healthcare is that it seems to improve patient recovery quite dramatically. When many of us think of recuperating, we think of lying in bed, cooped up indoors. But there is a panoply of possibilities for how a person might get better, feel better, in a space using biophilic design. Paying attention to natural forms and materials, especially natural light and fresh air, the proximity and presence of plants, almost always seems to have a positive effect on people’s health.
A couple of years back, I went to see a friend convalescing from an operation in a hospital built to biophilic specifications. Her room featured a large window that opened out onto a scene of domesticated horticulture. The sunlight and the panoramic view of a garden nursed my friend back to health in a way that seemed to have everything to do with the light and greenness coming into the room from that garden. That was when it occurred to me: hospitals could become places of healing if they did things the way of this newfangled one.
Hospitals are not only stressful for patients, but they can also be that way for the staff who work there and the friends and family who come to visit. That’s the problem with the healthcare environment for which biophilic design is a solution. The design puts you into direct contact with forms of nature that make you feel good or, in some cases, nudge you toward a healthier habit. Putting this design in place doesn’t just benefit patients; it’s for every person connected to a hospital in some way.
Emotional health, too, is improved by biophilic design. When people are in surroundings that seem natural and make one feel at home, comfortable, not sterile or sharp—one can better experience the full range of human emotions. Such surroundings feel safe, satisfying deeply embedded instincts that we all have to be close to the natural world. And when we feel at home and in “life,” we are freed to be more ourselves, to feel the feelings we often repress when stressed.
Implementing biophilic design in healthcare facilities need not be complicated or expensive. There are many simple, eminently doable ways of incorporating nature and natural metaphors into these spaces. Any one of the following actions is capable of producing salutary effects.
Biophilic design benefits from the potency of natural light. It elicits more positive moods in people, keeps them in better touch with their 24-hour cycle, and by doing both those things, is almost certainly connected with our overall well-being. For these senior living centers as, of course, for our hospitals and clinics biophilic design and the use of natural light should be the first two items under discussion, and the numbers are starting to bear that out.
Healthcare facilities can become far more appealing and beneficial to health when they have indoor plants and green spaces. With indoor plants, not only can the appearance of such a facility be greatly enhanced, but so too can the health understood here as the vital current of the boundlessly creative and often fantastic natural world in which humans participate of its patients and staff. For instance, these facilities can next incorporate not just potted plants but also indoor gardens or indoor “living walls” (i.e., walls partially or completely covered with vegetation and often with soil or a substitute), something the best of facilities are already doing.
Healthcare environments can benefit from the presence of water features like fountains, aquariums, and reflecting pools. They help create a sense of calm and tranquility for patients who are navigating the stress of a diagnosis and waiting for test results, as well as for family members who are trying to deal with the pain of seeing a loved one suffer. The water features can be placed in lobbies, waiting areas, and outdoor spaces custom and standard that allow us to use the catchphrase “helping to create a healing environment” with a soothing element.
Real-life instances work well to not only show the impact but also the true value that biophilic design brings to healthcare facilities. Where art thou, inspiring biophilic design? One powerfully dramatic example is the serene, beautiful, naturally sunlit, way-under-budget therapy building erected by the Mississippi Baptist Convention after Hurricane Katrina tore down most of the buildings on its formerly oak-filled grounds.
A large urban hospital embracing biophilic design in the most astonishing way is the first example that comes to my mind. The hospital campus included what has come to be known as a “healing garden” in its plans, a very nice name for an amazing concept. The idea was that the garden would offer not only the patients but also the staff and visitors a place to seek solace and feel good. A lot of thought was put into creating just the right kind of space.
A pediatric ward constructed using the fundamental concept of biophilic design offers another source of inspiration. This space is filled with nature murals, allowing little patients and their families some small comfort of not being cooped up indoors while they’re there. The ward provides as much natural light as children in northern climes during winter would usually experience. My favorite detail is a play area containing plenty of plants that lead to the “next nature” pamphlet this design team also constructed.
The hospice I went to was built around the basis of providing an environment of peace and comfort to those in their final stretch of life. For us, it meant a biophilic design, or a design centered around our natural world, that would evoke peace and calm. It was a pretty simple equation, with three main elements in play. One, the patients’ rooms all had large, more than average windows installed in them, with the kind of views that would look out on a fancy hotel resort’s rooms. All the rooms offered views of a large landscaped therapeutic garden. Two, most of the finishes within the new hospice were either of a natural or a “nearly-natural” material. We had installed plenty of wood and natural stone, and some “engineered-natural” work as well—all things that spoke of a higher quality, or a pairing of elements that were soft and calming in color to those of an eye-pleasing landscape. And three, the variety of both the interior as well as the exterior spaces gave all the patients and staff some “private space,” some kind of meditative nook and crannies to hide in that would bring peace and calm to those waiting and serve as a high-quality way of life.
Are you prepared to boost your healthcare environment using biophilic design? The following advice gives you a head start:
1. Be Clear on the Biophilic Design’s Purpose
Biophilic design does not encompass an entire hospital. Be selective about the areas to which you are applying the biophilic design principles. In a healthcare facility, it makes sense to use biophilic design in a patient’s room, for instance, since that is where the experience of the biophilic setting will have the most benefit for the patient.
2. Review the Science and Pick the Right Environmental Features
Once you achieve step one, be sure to apply biological features that have been shown by scientific research to elicit positive responses.
Take a Good Look Around: The first step is to take a physical inventory. Exactly how much space is there? What is the condition of that space? Is any of it being underused? What are the opportunities to most easily turn virtual outdoors into real reality and establish a viridarium? Evaluate what you have, and group together the kinds of spaces that can incorporate nature. Some evaluations have yielded truly astonishing results.
Begin on a small scale. You need not undertake major revisions to appreciate what biophilic design can do for you. Look for the kinds of “prospect-refuge” structures that can be incorporated into your space. And start with a few simple changes or additions, such as the following:
Commit to Stakeholder Engagement: Keeping a person-centered perspective and drawing on my team’s health care expertise, we committed to stakeholder engagement as our first strategy. This strategy involved a series of activities that included:
– Patient needs finding: We started by interviewing patients and documenting their needs. We then used this information to help guide the design process.
– Staff and patient co-creation: In the process of coming up with these designs and solutions, we worked directly with front-line staff and patients. To do this, we convened multiple large visioning sessions where coverage was needed and interactive problem-solving.
Make the health of patients, staff, and visitors your top priority when you make design decisions; consider the full experience from their point of view. Think about how each element, walls, space, light, even color, sound, and materials can create a better hospital.
Team Up with Professionals: You might want to think about hiring some top-notch biophilic designers, even if just for a consultation. You can collaborate with any mix of healthcare and design professionals. The key here is to work with people who understand both your hospital’s identity and the science of biophilic design, and not to be afraid to use what works elsewhere as a reference.
The biophilic design is not just a fad; it is an influential way of fashioning a health care setting that promotes not just healing but overall well-being and is a measurable way of de-stressing an environment that can be, well, sometimes quite the opposite. One of the most effective aspects of biophilic design is how it humanizes a setting that can often seem intimidating and not at all welcoming.
When you’re designing a new facility or enhancing an existing one, you have a great opportunity to use the principles of biophilic design to create a space that oozes health and that’s fundamentally, existentially comfortable as a place to be.
Biophilic design isn’t going to deliver these promises all by itself, without our intervention. Healthcare is a human experience. It’s about providing services to people who use these services, that’s us, and even when it’s not us, it’s really our friends and neighbors and co-workers. Healthcare is a hugely important human endeavor, and using the principles of biophilic design is one way to see that we’re creating facilities that will give the best possible and the lowest denominator possible to the amount of services that many of us are using at any given time in our lives.
Why not begin to adopt a biophilic design in your healthcare facility? Illuminate the care areas with natural light, accessorize the basic “building blocks” of the facility (i.e., walls, corridors, and waiting areas) with plants and artwork showcasing the serenity of the natural world, and play up the visual variety that Mother Nature so generously provides. Use the biophilic principles outlined in this article as a starting point to create your own visions of Healing Art. Here’s to creating healthcare environments that aren’t just about function and sterility, aren’t just about the insurance-ombudsman angle of keeping people alive in an institutional setting. Here’s to the function of the appearance of the natural world and the natural light by which we view it and live with it, as forms of what by default could be far more nurturing spaces.
