Subjective Well-being
Pati Santos
18 May 2020
Image: Lee F. Mindel, FAIA
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It’s Mental Health Awareness Week and we were wondering how much do you think architecture and interior design can affect happiness?
When someone talks about ‘evidence-based design’ we tend to think it is focused mostly on Objective Well-being (OWB). However, in order to cover the full spectrum of well-being we should also talk about Subjective Well-being (SWB) which is the scientific term for life satisfaction and therefore happiness understood as pleasure and no pain. It is noteworthy to say that it has been demonstrated that the built environment makes us happier when it is designed to show a connection with nature (biophilic design), when see curves and when we smell natural scents between many other factors.
Fortunately, SWB through architecture is under study to also become ‘evidence-based’ by neuroscientists applying electroencephalograms, electrocardiograms and MRI on people as they experience architecture and urban design (mostly in Virtual Reality until mobile EEG is more developed) in order to measure how our brain responds to sensory perception provoked by aesthetics. This is ‘Neuroarchitecture”, a link between neuroscience, Gestalt psychology, perception theory, and architecture.
The concept neuroarchitecture is quite recent but the interest behind it was already in Jonas Salk’s mind when he asked Kahn to design the Salk Institute in the 60s: an holistic approach focused on the experience of the architectural space. In that case, the requirement was to create a space for scientists to feel inspired to be creative and think. Kahn achieved it creating a central stream of water in the empty travertine plaza between the two symmetrical concrete volumes. An indisputable masterpiece that shows the power of architecture.
I am a designer and I have been doing research in behavioural neurosciences using qualitative methods/ interviews, with prominent figures in Neuroscience, and Psychology.
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