Wellbeing in Interiors

Philosophy, Design and Value in Practice

Elina Grigoriou

• Publisher: RIBA Publishing
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000705232
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This 4-colour practical guide explores how the design of interior spaces impacts wellbeing. In the built environment, this topic is generally overlooked, even though it is one of the most important topics in sustainable building. This book will enable project teams to understand how specific decisions about sustainable design and materials can be implemented on a day to day basis. Each Part ends by placing each issue into context, exploring how it is a part of sustainable design and includes practical examples. This books raises awareness of the impact interior environments have on wellbeing, and provide details and guidance on how to immediately apply the knowledge in this book to short and long term projects. It also quantifies the impacts in financial and other value terms, making this book immediately useful in a designer's day-to-day work.

Part 1
Philosophy: Prerequisites and Outputs of Wellbeing

1. Chapter 1: Prerequisites of wellbeing
2. Chapter 2: Outputs of wellbeing

Chapter 1
Prerequisites of wellbeing

1. Beauty
2. Comfort

In this chapter we will consider some prerequisites of design thinking which will support the direction a project will take. We will discuss the need for beauty, the aims to achieve comfort in design, and tackle the issue of performance and productivity links to the design.

We achieve wellbeing through our experience of beauty in the physical, emotional and spiritual realms. We support wellbeing in design by ensuring we are not removing comfort, and we are aiming for beauty. Our experience will be fully enabled only if we are comfortable. We are comfortable if there is harmony between the parts that make up the physical and emotional aspects of the space and ourselves, its occupants.

Once harmony is present then the expected and required results are produced. Whatever is defined as a task output, whether that is to sleep, eat, sell, meet, fix, create or write,

'Human perception works with the aim of making the surrounding world complete, stable and apprehensible. Aesthetic experiences fulfil the same purpose. In aesthetic experience we consciously attend to our spontaneous perceptual process of understanding; attending to aesthetic qualities in art and design – or in the world around – means that we open up for reflection on experiences as such. What we attend to is the perceptual qualities – for example colour and light qualities – not the physical thing.'¹ Ulf Klarén

a harmonious design will ensure a task's output is done to the best of the ability of that individual or group. So productivity and effectiveness will be the logical result.

So let's see how this all makes sense and open up the issues for exploration. What is beauty and what does it have to do with wellbeing?

Beauty

Beauty is an experience, it's not the property of an object. Sit with this one for a while if you're not ready to accept this as true. You don't need to accept or reject it at this stage.

Beauty is not a permanent state but the response a person will have to something, to another person, an action, a feeling, an object, and so on. We can all experience beauty through our eyes, ears, skin, and hands; basically through our senses; but we also experience it through our minds and our feelings. A mathematical equation can be beautiful, as can be a person's behaviour. In our living environment it has become a dominant quality through its visual representation, but this is restricting it to just one of our physical senses. Spaces have been designed with an imbalance of importance on what the eyes see, which has caused other important details and cognition to be forgotten. For example, feature wall colours absorb design time on the selection of the colour or wall finish without considering how thermal comfort may impact a user's experience because of the colour and the other way around. Humans find comfort through all of our senses, not just through the eyes, but also through an experience of being.

Let's delve into this philosophical idea though deeper and build it up from the basics, as it is core to contextualising design approaches on every project. Sir Christopher Wren is quoted as saying in his book Parentalia, 'There are two causes of beauty – natural and customary. Natural is from geometry consisting in uniformity, that is equality, and proportion. Customary beauty is begotten by the use, as familiarity breeds a love to things not in themselves lovely. Here lies the great occasion of errors, but always the true test is natural or geometrical beauty. Geometrical figures are naturally more beautiful than irregular ones: the square, the circle are the most beautiful, next the parallelogram and the oval. There are only two beautiful positions of straight lines, perpendicular and horizontal; this is from nature and consequently necessity...'²

FIGURE 1: 01 A beautiful idea in the V&A Museum lobby in London

His case is that nature is beautiful and all areas of life where harmony with her systems and proportions exist, such as music, architecture, poetry or design, will be beautiful. Perceptions of beauty linked to habit or social norms will be in absolute terms not true and not lasting. But we can't ignore these perceptions, so the question we need to respond to is: is there a place for both in our approach to design with the aim of wellbeing? Is a client who has been raised with certain social norms to be overruled when they show us their perception of beauty when it does not fall under nature's terms? How does a designer work with a client and their perception of beauty to ensure they have provided knowledgeable advice, understood the client and occupants and driven the project towards their wellbeing as the aim? Do designers' own perceptions of beauty fall under the Natural lawful type or are they following social norms and does it matter? Understanding what beauty is, and why it is important in the conversation of wellbeing, is core.

FIGURE 1: 02 Beauty in the fine craftsmanship and pattern arrangement of a Chinese textile piece

FIGURE 1: 03 Furniture showroom in London; beauty in simplicity and silence

Further on in this book, within case studies that showcase natural and customary design approaches, such as biophilia, user controllability and contour bias, it is suggested that there is a marriage of natural and customary issues within a design approach that eventually ensures a space is indeed designed for wellbeing and achieves beauty. The link between beauty and wellbeing is found in two main issues; first, along the Platonic and classical philosophy terms, where if something is considered beautiful we instinctively know it is so as it reflects our human self and reminds us of our own existence. It makes us mindful and fully present, and when we are in these states of awareness we are happier than when living in a dream. Secondly, beauty is also a tool to identify if an action, an idea or an object is appropriate to us or to the occupiers of the interior. The existence of beauty represents an ideal we aspire to as individuals to live up to and as societies.

It is a philosophical truth that beauty exists within a person and not the object or idea that is seen. So as beauty exists within the human being and not the object, knowing which object or idea that is able to stimulate beauty in another human or group of humans, is key to offering this experience and getting the design right. Part of the benefits of experiencing beauty is that it allows love, knowledge, measure (balance) and truth to be brought into the mix and this immediately means a conversation that includes emotions and connection between people rather than living in isolation. The second link between beauty and wellbeing is that proportions and performance settings of spaces that are considered over millennia to be attractive and pleasurable, follow certain proportions, certain dimensions and settings that when considered against the health of a human being, can be seen to be the ideal settings and provision to sustain a human. So it would seem that if we consider the settings and provisions from a scientific point and with only health in mind, we will find that these will also be considered as beautiful.

Beauty is explored, and its importance to humans analysed, by the modern-day philosopher Alain de Botton in his book The Architecture of Happiness. It is also captured by earlier philosophers such as R.W Emerson in his essay 'The Poet', and artists such as Mark Rothko in his book The Artist's Reality. They all approach the issue from different perspectives but their insights are comparable; when something is considered 'beautiful' by any one of us, it is answering our own internal state of existence.

Our attraction to beauty is an internal quest for what is true, what is yearned for by us in our life's journey to achieve what is referred to many times as 'inner peace', also known as 'completeness'. So the experience of completeness, of truth, is known through the experience of beauty. Philosophers would say that we experience beauty when we are partaking of truth – a high project and life objective for sure – and, no less important or 'right' to aim for it. For day-to-day life we could consider the use of beauty as a tool to test whether an experience, an idea, or an object, is created authentically and following a natural and lawful process. As, if it has, it will hold beauty in it for us, and if not, we need to work on it until it does.

Looking back at the description of what wellbeing is we saw that ease, calm and a sense of inner and outer fluidity are very much key aspects. So, if those are the effects of beauty then it makes sense to ensure it forms a part of a design's effect on people.

If an interior has been designed with the aim of finding and expressing what is true at that particular time and that aims to be part of the occupants' search for truth and completeness, then it will be considered to have beauty.

In the case of designing interiors we could seek beauty in two main ways: the way a space will influence behaviour and enable a particular way of life within it (links creating an experience), and the way we create the physical forms themselves (individual stimulus). We must question the presence of beauty in both the experience of life that users will be provided in the space, and the harmony of shapes, patterns, colours, air quality etc on our nature individually that then will form the whole effect.

Through a physical form or action, we see a promise and the answer of what is missing within us, to complete ourselves and our life. Logos, brands and advertising work in exactly the same way: the colours of a logo will promise you either calm or animation if you buy the object advertised or interact with the brand. We react to the ideals and characteristics we see things represent and a way of life they symbolically aspire us to follow. The one we are drawn to is the something missing from us.

We need to develop the conversation and knowledge in our industry and wider society to bring the idea of beauty, and wider meanings, to the fore. Until project teams add such topics to meeting agendas and they are discussed throughout design and delivery, the understanding of beauty and its importance to humankind, will remain incomplete in definition and understanding, and most importantly, designs will fall short of supporting wellbeing.

The art historian Wilhelm Worringer as a student in 1907 wrote his thesis titled 'Abstraction and Empathy: a Contribution to the Psychology of Style', which has become a seminal piece in art history and revolutionised art thinking. In it he proposes that the psychology of societies, based on their circumstances at any given time, affects their preferences on what they find to be aesthetically pleasing, what is considered beautiful. He noted two main artistic preferences society chooses to follow, the 'abstract' and 'realistic'. He observed that the preference of a society for one or the other style was a reflection of their political and societal structure, and in their lack of something. Societies with less autocratic approaches or disharmony preferred artistic expressions with order and clarity (realistic), and societies with organised structure and a certain routine, would seek an experience beyond the ordinary and to be in contact again with strong feelings and for their entire nature to feel alive (abstract). In both cases, people are looking to fill gaps that provide a sense of completeness and to re-balance things. This can also be reflected in family homes and corporations; if large changes and upheavals have either recently occurred or are going to be introduced over the next few years, the design intent can consider this as part of its strategic direction. In this way, the design will be found beautiful by occupants and support their wellbeing.

The description of 'functional' has been unjustly set as an opposite to 'beauty', as functional can be beautiful too. In fact, if the design of an interior does not function beautifully, in the eyes of the users it will lack real beauty as it will not achieve the aspired ideals that are missing. So many images of attractive interiors or eye-catching photos can be found in magazines or design books, only to then realise in real life that the beauty was not in the space itself but in the photo. beauty in the built environment must be found in the way interiors make us feel and the way we interact with them – what inner questions it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• General approach of the book
• What to expect in each part
• Defining wellbeing
• Part 1 Philosophy: prerequisites and outputs of wellbeirig
• Part 2 Design in practice: delivering a design for wellbeing
• Part 3 Design in practice: aesthetic issues affecting wellbeing
• Part 4 Design in practice: physical issues affecting wellbeing
• Part 5 Value in practice: measuring wellbeing
• Refereneces
• Index
• Image credits