Quality of place and wellbeing

Recent research has established a substantial pool of good knowledge about the impact of the designed environment on our well-being. Healthcare and education settings provide good measures of outcomes and replicable situations enabling objective fieldwork. This research clearly indicates that our designed settings have a major impact on our well-being and that this is economically significant. It is more difficult to measure impact in less obviously functional settings, but an analysis of the data on hospitals suggests the factors that make people better more quickly are seldom to do with the place being a hospital but relate to such fundamental and universal human needs as privacy, community, views, contact with nature, and legibility of place. Perhaps hospitals should be designed as places to heal and schools as places to discover rather than machines for treating and teaching. Well-being is likely to be enhanced by making good places whatever the setting.