Designing for the Mind

Source: Anjan Chatterjee, using ChaptGPT

Can we design space optimally for work? Open office designs have not been especially successful. Other spare designs that convey a rational order with lined-up desks have similarly fallen short. Playful spaces created by large tech firms seem to have had their day and may now be falling out of favor. Since the pandemic, employers struggle to bring workers back to their offices, despite the social advantages of interacting with other people and the innovation that can be triggered by chance encounters.

Biophilic Design

A recent and popular movement leans into biophilic design of interiors. A casual search through the internet would suggest that biophilic design is good for what ails you, whether you are at work, study, home, or play. The term biophilia is attributed to psychoanalyst Eric Fromm (Fromm, 1973/1992) and was popularized by the biologist E O Wilson (Wilson, 1984). As commonly understood, the term refers to people’s innate affinity for nature. One reason (to which I am sympathetic) for our current malaise is that we are disconnected from nature. The design solution to this disconnection is to bring nature into interior spaces.

The biophilic belief is that nature has specific salutary effects. It helps us restore depleted attentional resources, reduce stress, and improve creativity. If we resign ourselves to being indoors much of the time, maybe we can mimic nature indoors and reap natural benefits. Instructional manuals and consultants for biophilic design abound. Recommendations range from bringing in plants, gardens, and moss walls, to incorporating abstract patterns like fractals. Natural materials and curved shapes help. Natural light, sounds, and smells enrich the simulacrum of the outdoors.

The annoying question that scientists ask is: Does it work?

Our Study

We recently published our investigation comparing the effects of the natural environment, a biophilic space, and a control space, on aesthetic valuation, attention, mood, and creativity (Holzman, Meletaki, et al., 2025). The natural environment was a forested area adjacent to a university. The biophilic room had plants, a moss wall, a slab of fir as a desk, and bamboo panel on the ceiling that cast a soft diffuse overhead light. The room had earth tones and the walls had textured paper. The rug was handcrafted with a loose fractal pattern. The control room was a testing room identical in size and shape to the biophilic room which was basically a plain box with little distraction—the kind found in almost every psychology department in the U.S. Different people were tested in each location.

What did we find? For aesthetic appreciation of the environment, we used our environmental aesthetic dimensions of coherence, fascination, and hominess (Coburn et al., 2020). For each dimension, the natural environment was more aesthetically pleasing than the biophilic room, which was more pleasing than the control room. We did not find differences in people's attention or working memory across the spaces. Nor did we find differences in mood. However, people were more creative in nature than in either indoor spaces. Specifically, they were more cognitively flexible and could better deploy divergent thinking.

Implications

Experimental science proceeds incrementally and conclusions drawn from specific studies are provisional. Based on our results, can we say that a biophilically designed room does not restore attention or reduce stress? It would be premature to arrive at that negative conclusion. A null result like ours raises further and more nuanced questions. Perhaps we did not have a critical ingredient in our biophilic room (like windows with natural light). Perhaps people need to be ensconced in a space for longer durations if the beneficial effects on attention and mood are to occur. Perhaps the effects of biophilia work better in specific populations: Maybe it helps restore attention in people with attention deficit disorder or reduces stress in highly anxious people. These are all possibilities to be addressed in future studies.

We can say that people were more creative in nature than they were indoors. The intuition that nature loosens the rigidity of our thinking is right. Stepping away from our desks and sitting in a park or taking a walk in the woods might be just what we need to break logjams in our mind.