Ever wanted a quiet space in the office to just hanker down and focus? If you work from home, how about having a MOVEABLE seated pod that has adjustable lighting, great sound proofing and even your kids can use for homework? Using some of the main biophilic design elements, Nookpods are sustainable mobile personal spaces for open plan offices, homes, and even stadiums. Currently also donated to the NHS during the Covid-19 crisis, we chat to the Nookpod company founder, David O’Coimin about altruism, acoustics, neuro-diversity, lighting, nature, ADHD and personal space.

We work so hard to make our working, home and leisure environments acoustically better that we may be overlooking an essential aspect, our need for “sound”, our need especially for the “sound of nature”. Back in the office many of us work in cacophony or we are discovering during this “lockdown” that we live in homes where the TV is too loud, our hospitals are often crazy busy noisy environments, everywhere designers are struggling to clean these spaces of aggressive and distracting audio disturbance, but once we do that, how do we know that these spaces provide us with the optimum environments for focus, creativity and wellbeing? We speak with Evan Benway, Jazz drummer and Managing Director of the Sound Agency about their new sound system “Moodsonic”, which combines algorithms, audio technology, nature recordings and a lot of research to create inspiring environments to live and work in.

Charles Smee, is Founder and Senior Partner of the innovative transactional marketing company, Transaction Focus. With no permanent office space, Transaction Focus has been adopting principles of nature on many different levels to sustain and grow profitable companies. We speak with Charles to find out how we can mimic the change, flexibility and eco-systems of nature into our own businesses which will work for SMEs as well as multi-nationals not just in terms of green visuals but with biomimetic conceptualisation how we can apply nature’s structure onto our own business principles.

Research has shown that contact with nature has a psycho-therapeutic

effect. It also has been proven that being surrounded by nature, with all

the multi-sensory effects it has on us, increases our immunity, improves

resilience and improves our mood. In fact being in a calm environment

allows part of our brain to rest. Mindfulness is a way of being present

without judgment and research has shown that brainwaves change when people

practice this too.

We speak with environmental psychologist and author of Designology about how we can improve our home space room by room while we are in lockdown during the Covid 19 period.

If you are working from home for the first time during this Covid 19

Lockdown, or maybe you have always worked from home, there are some simple

biophilic design “tweaks” you can do to really improve your workspace. From

clearing clutter, to your lights, nature views, air quality and even sounds

to improve your space, help you focus more, be less stressed, be creative

and productive too. We speak to Sally Augustin, author of the great book “

Designology” to find out what we can each do right now without having to go

out or take up too much time out of our day.

Many things have changed for humans since their early days as a species—how

excited do you think early Homo sapiens would have been by heating, air

conditioning and weather tight structures to install them in, for example?

Not everything is different, however. We still have fundamentally the same

brains as the first creatures we would recognize as “one of us.” That means

we process and respond to the basic sensory inputs we see, hear, feel,

taste, and smell today as our earliest human ancestors did.

Neuroscience research suggests that those sensory consistencies may be why

biophilic design gives us such a powerful mental boost today. Biophilic

design applies the same sorts of design principles in today’s

built-environments that were naturally present in the outdoor settings

where we were at ease aeons ago, when our bodies took on their current

form. We still feel comfortable in biophilic spaces today, and the sorts of

experiences that we have in biophilicly designed spaces boost our cognitive

performance, for example, and for some of us even enhance the performance

of our immune systems.

Our brains continue to respond positively to the sorts of sensory

stimulations that long ago signalled good times, or at least that bad times

were unlikely.

So, what are the principles of biophilic design?

In a biophilic space, there is moderate visual complexity. This means that

there is order in the world around us, and a carefully edited palette of

colours and shapes in play. Moderate visual complexity makes it less

stressful for us to continuously scan the world around us—something we

still do without considering what we’re up to today, just as our forebears

did aeons ago to determine if there was danger nearby. Clutter creates high

visual complexity, which is why it makes us tense.

We speak with Environmental and Design Psychologist, Sally Augustin. Sally

is also Principal at ‘Design with Science’. She is also Fellow of the

‘American Psychological Association’ and author of “Place Advantage:

Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture” (Wiley 2009) and with Cindy

Coleman, “The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to

Inform Design” (Wiley, 2012).

Should art in hospitals and elsewhere incorporate biophilia? With the arts

quite starved of funding generally incorporating visual arts into

healthcare and other environments is a challenge. We speak with Victoria

Hume, Director of the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance to find out

how the Alliance is helping broker arts into healthcare and beyond through

a network of regional “champions”, building on grassroots arts programmes

and building bridges to network positive creative solutions to those who

need it. Her own background as a musician and arts worker is fascinating in

itself, as is her work on delirium which includes composing music that

address delirium.

A fascinating conversation with consultant futurist Mark T Jones on what he

hopes the future might hold for biophilic design, and what we, as

individuals on this planet, could do ourselves to make our environments a

whole lot better. He talks about symbolism in Africa and the connection to

nature he’s witnessed on that continent. We also touch on vernacular

imagery, the Knepp Wildland project, the rural paintings of Constable,

prisons and how we might interpret ‘Mother Earth’.

Theatre, TV and film create simulations of environments to transport the

audience somewhere else. Similarly here at Argenta Wellness and those who

work using biophilic design, we create harmony by mimicking nature to bring

about a simulated environment of an outside space to bring peace and calm

to workplaces, healthcare and so on. In this podcast we speak with actor

Paul Ryan (Brexit: The Uncivil War and Christine Keeler) who enjoyed a

3-year run in London’s theatre-land in Mamma Mia. Paul describes how with

backdrops and actors’ states of mind, they create ..