Biophilic design is the wellness revolution happening all around us

Inside the movement rethinking the design of our cities, spaces and systems through the wonder of nature

As I step off the train at London’s Victoria Station and make my way through the concourse, I can’t help but feel part of something.

Maybe I’ve been exclusively working from home for too long. Maybe it’s the separation from the human energy of urban centres. Or maybe it’s simply excitement for where I’m heading today.

I join the commuters spilling out into the surrounding streets like a burst dam, meandering through buses, traffic lights and signposts. As I walk further, the torrents thin as people are absorbed into glass fronted offices and revolving doors, until it feels like I’m the last one walking.

Suddenly, in front of me, the gothic towers of Westminster Abbey rise up. I ponder the pioneering architects who imagined it, and the brave souls who built it. I consider the sovereigns it’s crowned, wedded and mourned, and the wonderful sense of awe it’s provided through the ages.

Before I’ve taken a dozen more steps, I hear the famous chimes of Big Ben. It appears behind the Abbey, a golden marvel glittering in the gloom, and standing guard to the adjoining Houses of Parliament. I wonder what it’s like to bear witness to some of Britain’s most profound moments and movements.

It’s the perfect introduction to my purpose today: the 2nd Biophilic Design Conference in Central Hall Westminster, London. A wonderful event that brings together the world’s leading architects, interior designers, urban planners, creatives and innovators — with a mission to create a healthier, more resilient and regenerative world.

Here are my reflections on a day spent exploring a vibrant, biophilic future.

There’s a shifting mindset to systemic change.

The first clue arrived in the theme of the day: “Biophilic Design for a Regenerative Future”.

Sustainability is out! Regeneration is in! But the distinction is an important one. Regenerative design goes beyond traditional sustainability ambitions to create systems and structures that cause a net-positive impact on both environment and society.

In simpler terms, rather than finding a point of equilibrium, it recognises the damage we’ve done to our natural ecosystems and seeks to both restore and regenerate those systems.

Regenerative design also recognises the viewpoint that human and natural systems are deeply interwoven and interconnected. The global crises we face today such as climate, biodiversity loss and mental health are not standalone issues, but symptoms of a deeper disconnection between humanity and nature.

I loved this quote from Donella Meadows, author of Thinking in Systems, as shared by Luke Engleback in his talk about ecourbanism:

“Systems happen all at once. They are connected not just in one direction, but in many directions simultaneously.”

As the day progresses, it’s clear that this mindset shift is still evolving. Many talks tend to zoom in towards individual crises like climate — whereas the real predicament to overcome remains our systemic disconnection from nature.

(If you’re interested in exploring more about the processes and thinking behind regenerative design, I found this article a really good starting point).

“There’s no such thing as neutral space.”

If there’s one takeaway from the whole day, — and indeed the keynote from Tye Farrow, leading architect and author of the wonderful book Constructing Health — I think it’s this.

I love the simplicity of the message. That our built environment will take us one of two ways: it can undermine health, or it can cause health. It’s a phrase that encourages action in a subtle yet profound manner.

I’ve read Tye’s book, which has become a feature on my desk over the past 12 months. It’s the best summary I’ve found for exploring the very nature of biophilic and salutogenic design through architectural research that draws on fields including environmental psychology and neuroscience. It’s also a beautiful publication.

Tye’s focus on health is a critical reminder not just of the core focus of biophilic design, but what all design could be — and its basis in the natural world.

Architects are the undisputed forerunners, but there’s plenty of industries exploring this further.

Focusing on children is both heart-warming and mission critical.

I found it incredibly moving to hear of wonderful businesses and approaches focused on offering the youngest minds of our world the experiences for a different future.

Adam White and Andrée Davies, founders of Davies-White Ltd, are landscape architects specialising in nature-connected family friendly landscapes and gardens, created through the use of natural, sustainable materials. Their work exemplified how biophilic projects can capture the attention of leading advocates of the natural world, such as Sir David Attenborough and the Princess of Wales, but most importantly, how these biophilic spaces empower children.

Similarly, it was brilliant to see School of Biophilia exhibiting — inspired, I’m told, by last year’s conference. Their focus is on sharing the power of biophilia to connect people with the natural world, focused not just on schools, but also businesses and workplaces too.

For me, it was a timely reminder that nature reconnection is a long term mission that arguably requires the young more than any other demographic. And given our connections with nature are often forged in childhood, it’s a critical area of focus for today.

Cities can drive change. But it shouldn’t stop there.

Figures shared from the World Economic Forum’s BiodiverCities project attribute cities being responsible for 80% of global GDP. They also contribute around 75% of greenhouse gases, and consume 75% of natural resources. When you consider they house 54% of the global population, the imbalance is clear.

From an urban planning and architectural perspective, I can understand why cities present a major opportunity for change. As Nick Grayson, former Climate Change Sustainability and Green City Manager at Birmingham City Council shared:

“Nature underpins the whole growth and quality of life agenda yet most cities see nature as a maintenance issue and a cut-able budget”.

Birmingham was already seen as one of Europe’s greener cities, but through the lens of the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, uncovered critical need to improve the quality, size and connectedness of its green spaces to ensure nature provided wider societal benefits in areas like wellbeing, climate resilience, and managing economic risk.

It’s response was to trail blaze a new governance model for cities to place nature at the heart of their overall strategy. Nature now lies at the centre of the whole council plan — including housing, children, health and jobs — and helped Birmingham to the exciting accolade of becoming the UK’s first “City of Nature”.

As Rob Delius, Head of Sustainability at design practice Stride Treglown, shared whilst drawing on the example of Singapore:

“Cities can completely reimagine themselves as a city in nature.”

But what about the indoors?

Plans to transform cities into truly biophilic spaces are incredibly exciting and urgently required. But there’s clearly a need to go further, and inside these spaces too.

The average person spends 90% of their time indoors (a much travelled figure now decades old but rarely disputed). It’s where most of us spend a whopping 22 hours of our day working, resting and sleeping.

It’s our indoor spaces that offer the ripest opportunity for paradigm-shifting change, if we get it right. Digital interventions are one route that can magic the ultimate biophilic experiences through personal, scalable and effective nature-powered spaces to transform health and performance.

It also leans into another topic that came up a number of times in conversations I had at the conference — the importance of designing for neurodiversity.

As our understanding around conditions like ADHD and autism improve, it reveals how poor certain spaces are for supporting these people. Leaning into digital offers up new opportunities for personalising individual spaces to suit different types of people, tasks and needs with effortless ease.

Artificial intelligence can support natural intelligence.

Beyond Moodsonic, a generative soundscape creator for workplaces, hospitals and education, I’m not sure I heard AI mentioned once at the conference.

This exclusion felt neither deliberate nor coincidental, but perhaps further symptomatic of a world where humanity and nature do remain extraordinarily separate.

There’s no doubt AI can be a major accelerant for the biophilic design movement. It’s not about competing with nature but creating meaningful ways to interweave its magic with our daily lives.

Visuals, sounds, air quality, lighting and temperature all contribute to the “feel” of our environments, impacting the way we think, feel and behave. They can increasingly be measured, assessed and recreated, ultimately crafting adaptive environments that offer direct evidence-based health interventions, and can instantly respond to our changing physiological needs.

It will help close the gap between design intent and real-world outcomes — bringing more science into the art of design. It can help create spaces that don’t just feel biophilic, but are quantifiably biophilic too.

There’s a lot to talk about here, and we’ll undoubtedly see and hear much more in future months of wonderful examples where AI has helped unlock some truly innovative biophilic solutions.

We’re still stuck with numbers.

One of the recurring frustrations I’ve heard from members of the biophilic design community is despite the long-standing and irrefutable evidence in support of biophilic design, it still struggles to scale.

As summarised by Oliver Health, founder of design consultancy Oliver Health Design, biophilic design remains silo’d by factors including cost, education, research adoption, regulation and procurement.

But I also think it remains misunderstood outside the industry. Beyond the numbers of percentage uplifts in productivity, wellbeing and performance — which come from environmental psychologists, architectural practices and design businesses, lie human stories. And we’re less good at making these the heroes of our ambitions.

To draw on Nick Grayson once more, he touched on the power of seeking “Earth Stories” to both engage locals in plans to transform Birmingham into a true “City of Nature” and to draw out people’s own realisations of the proximity of nature to people’s own faith, quality of life and way of living.

The power of storytelling is something I’ve learned a lot from my time at Portal. We’ve tried to avoid dry statistics of how Portal might make people feel “27% less stressed”, or help “83% of customers sleep better”, in favour of sharing genuine, wholesome customer stories.

We’ve heard of Portal being used from childbirth to end-of-life care, to create the most beautiful and dignified experiences. We’re heard of its usage in war zones like Ukraine to protect children from the sounds of bombs landing on their city, and help them find sleep. We’ve heard of Portal helping customers manage challenging conditions like psychosis, narcolepsy and autism.

We humans are a species that communicate through stories. If we’re to create products and experiences that connect people with the natural world, then its stories — not stats — that we should champion to spread our message.

Our biophilic future requires a connection of hearts and minds.

Reflecting on the day, I find myself returning to the Birmingham example once more, and the realisation that their green city had so much more headroom to grow.

“Birmingham’s nature wasn’t big enough, joined up enough or high enough quality to be able to reach all its citizens to give them wellbeing. It wasn’t sufficient to stand up to climate resilience and risk, and put the city at economic risk. We knew we had to do something.”

I feel the same about our biophilic community. The day shared countless examples of brilliant projects, businesses and initiatives, and I hope the next 12 months sees more of us collaborate in the name of health and nature connection.

To take the NHS as an example, there were plenty of examples throughout the day of the application of biophilic principles in care, treatment and recovery settings, but I could feel the frustration at the difficulty of rolling out these successes at greater scale.

In my mind, the key challenge is to shift hearts and minds — of decision makers, creators and communities. Our strongest hand to achieve this is by continuing to create the most incredible experiences, sharing the human stories of transformation that lie behind them, and collaborating.

I hope, driven by values in community and connection, we can continue to surface more evidence and inspiration to improve the quality of what we do, and ensure nature-powered design spreads deeper across all industries.

With nature, we have a beautiful, wise and magical companion — it’s time to rediscover that flourishing future together.

Biophilic design is the wellness revolution happening all around us was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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