Why Does Biophilic Design Make Us Feel So Good?

Jennifer (0s): Hi, Monica. 

Monica (1s): Hi, Jennifer. How excited are you for today's interview? 

Jennifer (12s): You know, I am beyond excited. I've been such a fan of Bill Browning for as long as I can remember, and we hadn’t met before. My work is all about connecting people with experiences and nature, and he is just a wealth of information about the reasons why these experiences are so beneficial. Also guys, just a head's up, you might hear a few sirens in the background towards the beginning of the recording. I mean, I live in New York city. What are you going to do? 

Monica (33s): I'll try to forgive you. 

Jennifer (34s): Thanks a lot. 

Monica (37s): All right. So as Jennifer mentioned, we recently sat down with Bill Browning and Bill is a designer in one of the green building industries foremost thinkers and strategist, and he has worked on green solutions and biophilic design at all levels of business, government and society. He co-founded the environmental consulting firm, Terrapinn Bright Green way back in 2006. And today we're diving into a report he authored called The 14 Patterns that Improve Health and Well-being in the Built Environment. And I promised you, it's a super interesting read. 

It's all about the relationship between nature, human health, and the built environment. It's absolutely fascinating. And if that doesn't peak your interest Bill was just recently mentioned in a Vogue article

Jennifer (1m 19s): Wasn't that? So cool. I loved that article with him. And one thing we learned is that there is now a 15th pattern, which I think is my all time favorite at one I can really relate to. 

Monica (1m 29s): I know. So should we be saying anything about it? 

Jennifer (1m 32s): No, no, no. Let's just leave the big reveal to Bill. I will say that I love how these ideas are evolving and growing as more science and research comes out. 

Monica (1m 40s): All right. Let's get into our episode with Bill Browning 

Bill, how are you? Welcome to Biophilic Solutions and thank you for being our second guest. 

Bill (1m 43s) Thanks. Happy to be here today. 

Jennifer (1m 60s): We are thrilled to have you. Monica and I have been huge fans for many, many years, and we're thankful that you're here today with us. 

Monica (2m 8s): Yeah, and so we want to just jump right in and would love it if you would start with sort of telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do. 

Bill (2m 15s): I am a designer as a recovering real estate developer, and I run a small research consulting firm called Terrapin Bright Green based in New York City and Washington, DC. 

Monica (2m 22s): Right. And tell us what Terrapin Bright Green does, for consulting. 

Bill (2m 26s) Terrapin is a small firm focused on green buildings. So, our work is doing green building consulting, usually on some weird and complex buildings, we've got a 118 story tower in Malaysia that's just about finished. We just had a really amazing little energy and nature center on Jones beach in New York. It's just completed, it’s net zero already. There's a really interesting conversation about resilience and energy and ecosystems, and overlap of all that stuff. So yeah, we were working on various new communities in various places and other buildings. 

Jennifer (3m 26s): Yeah. That's pretty neat because, Monica and I know, you've been in the space of Biophilia longer than pretty much anyone. Can you kind of give us a little background into what Biophilia is and how you actually, when was the first time you found out about biophilia?

Bill (3m 39s): Absolutely. It's really just how we respond to experiences with nature and these sort of deep-seated connections we have with nature and natural systems. Our introduction to it was when we were doing work, case studies on early green buildings. And we're seeing these really surprising and spectacular jumps in worker productivity and thought it was maybe daylighting it was this and that, you know, better indoor air quality, but all these sort of bits and pieces, but didn't have a larger context to connect it to. 

And we got introduced to an environmental psychologist named Judith Heerwagen who works for the general services administration and also teaches at University of Washington. And Judy was the one who brought us into the context of Biophilia and early research going on in that field. And it made sense because what we were seeing we thought was really increased sales, lower absenteeism rates that are healing and all these sorts of things were kind of  placeholders for maybe this is a bigger issue about health and well-being and how, how we could create spaces and really maximize that. 

Biophilia really gets that done. When you really think about it, right, how long, how long do people in buildings? Not very long. So we've spent the vast majority of time, and people have been people outside. So we’re attuned to that and we should be bringing those sorts of characteristics back into our buildings. 

Monica (5m 29s): Well, and I think that the green building industry and the design industry has really been at the forefront of biophilic design. And I think, you know, obviously you have been there, I want to say since the beginning, but one of the things you're really well-known for is putting together patterns. And really, I don't know if the right word is like codifying the concept into sort of 14 patterns, and then I know you have a 15th now. Am I saying that correctly? Is that sort of why you brought those together? Can you tell us a little bit about how that came to be? 

Bill (6m 3s): Yeah. I mean the early conversations about Biophilic are all these different experiences of nature all over the place, and you end up with these lists that are a hundred items long or 72 items long. A former partner, a business partner, used to say look at that list in my head explode. As a designer I can’t deal with that much, right? Mmm Mmm. 

When we started digging through the science to understand what was going on and how people were responding, we realized that all these different experiences sort of sell into a smaller set of categories that we grouped by direct experiences of nature called nature and space. Representations in nature, or what we call natural analogues and then the three-dimensional characteristics of the space itself. 

Once we got to that, we could start saying, okay, here are different experiences. We chose patterns because pattern languages and pattern books are then used in design for hundreds of years. 

Monica (7m 27s): Oh, that makes perfect sense. I had never connected that until now. 

Bill (7m 31s): Yeah, it's an old, old tradition with doing design, but hose pattern books were usually objects. Like this is the way you do a doorframe. This is the way to do this is a way you create revival, so patterns are an old way of designing. And it was really Christopher Alexander and his team who started making a shift to the patterns and what experiences the patterns could create. So we decided that it made the most sense to do this as an experiential pattern.  

Monica (8m 14s): So just to reiterate, there's three sort of groupings, if you will, right. There's nature in space, natural analogues, and nature of the space. And we'll sort of dig into all three of these, right? Yeah. I mean, I would love, I mean, Jennifer, this is kind of your world, like nature in the space. 

Monica (8m 34s): Yeah I’m fascinated by that. Can you kind of delve into that a bit more because what does nature in the space mean exactly? 

Bill (8m 41s): So that's trying to bring direct experiences of nature into the built environment. And some of the most obvious and one that you'd find the earliest in most science, is just having a view to nature. So, you know, the very first step that most people come across when they dig into Biophilia is Roger Ulrich’s work at Texas, A and M University, where they're looking at patients who are recovering from one very specific surgery coming from all over the country for the surgery, but they all wound up in one ward for recovery. 

And their recovery was actually fairly long, they noticed the differences in outcomes. So they finally combed through all the patients and found a 23 matched error. So they could match demographically, a paint color of the room was matched, and the remaining variable was what was the view out the window? So 23 of those people had a view to a brick wall, and 23 of them had a view to trees and shrubs. There was a significant difference in how long it took them to recover.

Jennifer (10m 03s): Was that the early 1980s, correct?

Bill (10m 06s): ‘84, yeah. And you know, that's kind of one of the first pieces of what now is called evidence based design and that leads to the whole healing gardens movements, you see healing gardens in hospital's worldwide. And two of the most elaborate and famous are Koo Teck Puat and Ng Teng Fong in Singapore, both public hospital's done by CPG architects. 

The first one, Koo Teck Puat is two wings, one’s a surgical office wing, and the other is wards and office, and then separated between them is an artificial stream rain-forest and all the rooms look out into that. When you're in the wards, you look out into this or you look down the stream to what was a water storage space and was re-done as a more naturalistic reservoir. 

And then the roof of the surgical wing is organic community gardens. It's extraordinary. And, and the space between the two wings are these public walkways on multiple levels and a restaurant. And they actually encourage people in the neighborhood as you're walking from your apartment to the transits or a transit station, we can walk through the middle of the hospital and it pulls the hospital intp the fabric of the community, but because of this habitat, you'll see these big areas where there are all these pictures. 

And so here are the hundred different species of butterflies they've seen on the sites. Here are the 80 species of birds they've seen on the site. It's just, you know, it's, it's really amazing. The newer hospital that was done by CPG Longworth HOK architects is in an even more urban area of Singapore, so that hospital’s a high-rise. And so the way they made a connection to nature there was going up the side of the building, you have these stair-stepping little gardens so that each ward is four or six beds and at the head of the bed is a floor to ceiling window with a view out to one of those sky gardens. So everybody, every bed, has a view to a little sky garden.

And then on the roof of another section of the building is a more elaborate garden that actually has water features in it. And that adjoins the break area for the hospital staff. 

Jennifer (15m 17s): Are you seeing more of this desire from hospitals in the US now to be more Biophilic like this?

Bill (15m 22s): Yeah, there's a lot of amazing healing and gardens in the US and there’s been some really good work. One of the, in retrospect, probably, not so surprising outcomes was, you know, there's a huge turnover of nursing staff. And so we found that the hospitals that have really nice healing gardens, it’s not just straight for the patients, but it's been a real boom for the staff and those hospitals frequently have less turnover and the staff have a place to take a break. 

Monica (16m 4s): Are you reading anything about COVID outcomes with everything that's happened this past year, or has anything been starting to be written about that? 

Bill (16m 12s): So, you know, obviously the COVID patients are typically a nice use, not seeing much as anything. But we did see a friend of ours, Merril Phillips, amazing artist, did now several of these, but the first one was at Mount Sinai in Manhattan. An installation where they took a room, and she did a video installation, put it in comfortable seats and plants and created a break space for 15 minutes, a video nature experience for hospital staff. 

Some of the neuroscience team at Sinai has been monitoring the outcomes and it’s been really quite extraordinary. And that's, she is now a, they're now creating four other places as well. 

Monica (17m 21s): Yeah. I mean, I know when I just take a quick walk through the woods, like between neighborhoods, like it's just a game-changer right. Just a small five, 10 minutes is all I need. And I know Jennifer you’re up in Central Park all the time. So, for the nature in space, am I simplifying it to say, bringing nature indoors? You know, I'm looking at the patterns in front of me and we'll put these up on the website, but you know, it's like water, light, air flow, you know, a visual connection with nature, sounds, stimuli. 

Bill (17m 57s): All of that. And then also, so there are seven patterns within that group and they're all those sorts of direct ways to bring those direct experiences into nature, into a building, into a room. Even just picturing nature. So one, one of the things we learned is that when I'm looking at nature and I'm experiencing nature, the brain shifts processing mode and the prefrontal cortex quiets down, and this is what's called attention restoration theory. 

After that experience, I have better cognitive capacity and so this was, attention restoration theory was developed by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan at the University of Michigan and the question for a long time was how long does it take. And a really amazing experiment done by a team at the University of Melbourne a few years ago showed that all they had to do was show people a picture of nature for 40 seconds for them to process it.  

And so the state, the description of the state the brain is in when you're deeply experiencing nature is called soft fascination. You’re very much aware, you’re fascinated, but you’re not expending a lot of energy, it’s a relaxation response, you're not expending a lot of energy to write. It's a relaxation response. I love that. And then even just seeing a picture of nature, we know also from later work, cardiac patients, but other people's work at the University of Washington, is that seeing a picture of nature will lower blood pressure. 

Monica (20m 6s): That's incredible. Talk about the second sort of bucket, if you will, the natural analogs, what does that mean? Natural analogs? This isn't, I mean, I think of digital. Is this analog? 

Bill (20m 20s): These are representations in nature. Okay. So the first is biomorphic forms. So shapes in the leg of a piece of furniture, or the leg of a claw foot tub, or the handle that has a leaf shape in it. Even just fabric patterns with fabrics and natural shapes. So biomorphic forms can be three dimensional or can be flat.

And the second is that we have are uses of natural materials. So the brain starts between alive and not alive sub-consciously and almost instantaneously. And we have a preference for the alive. So there's a really, really strong preference for wood and stone and other natural materials. 

And in fact, that's one of our, and hopefully one of our next research projects to actually dive into we've talked to some neuroscientists the response is that maybe one of two things. The first is what's called semantic processing in the brain. In semantic processing, the brain goes, “Ah wood, alive”. So it might be that, or it may be this next pattern, which is complexity of order, which has to do with fractal and collinear patterns. 

When fractures occur are all over the place to nature. So fractals are repeating forms and they can be generated mathematically. Nature produces fractals that tend not to be exact. They frequently are, have some variation within. So those are called statistical fractions. You're sitting here looking at one of my favorites right now, the lights coming through the skylight over me onto a ficus tree and you’re seeing it on the wall across from me the amazing light pattern on the wall. 

Monica (23m 04s): Oh, interesting. Okay. So this isn't just like a leaf or a snowflake. Are those fractals or am I, am I just thinking more of a different pattern. 

Bill (23m 24s): Those are good fractals, but it's also waves on a beach, in a fireplace, right. Those are statistical fractals, they’re similar but they’re not exactly exact, each one. 

Jennifer (23m 42s): That's so fascinating. I think about that, cause I love when I see light, I live in a tent in the summertime and sometimes when I used to see the light coming through the tent and the way the light shined at a certain time a day, there’s just this beautifulness to it. Just this raw beauty of light that kind of comes through, but it ebbs and flows because of the shade, and would that be a part of it? I guess? 

Bill (24m 1s): Well, that's the dynamic light aspect, the ebbs and flows, and dynamic patterns that are created by the shadows can be a statistical fractal and the dappled light through trees is one of the most classic. We also know that when we are watching fractals move, we're just sort of transfixed. And when you think about it what’s the rational reason why I should stare at a fireplace for hours? There’s no rational reason why we should sit there and stare at a fireplace forever, but we are transfixed and what’s happening? That’s a moving fractal. 

Monica (24m 58s): Well and you see the, the fireplace, it's like the videos of the fireplace. I mean, you know, it's sort of like, it seems so bizarre, but I guess it makes total sense. 

Jennifer (25m 9s): I do that at home, by the way, I put my TV on the fireplace, like watch it in my upper east-side apartment. But I love it. 

Monica (25m 19s): You're doing research on this. So, what does that mean? Like what, what does that entail to sort of dig into the natural analogues and why? 

Bill (25m 29s): So what we wanted, we just wrote a paper on fractals. So fractals occur so much in nature that when we see them in human designed objects, it’s actually easier for the brain to process. The brain kind of goes “Oh I know what that is, yep, got that”.

And so you actually see a measurable drop in stress. And you can measure it quickly just through the galvanic skin test. So there's teams of a scientists who are working on also, so when you see collinear forms, lines that are moving in single patterns waving or things like that, that's also the process. 

When we see those fractals, the term, who I’m not sure who coined it, but we hear from our friends at the University of Oregon is Fractal Fluency. Where we’re fluent with fractals so when we use them in human design and objects, we’re already predisposed to understand what it is so we get a relaxation response. 

Monica (27m 0s): And so if we’re in our home or we're in an office environment, or obviously an institutional could be education or a hospital, we can, when we walk into a room, we're processing everything and it's just an easier processing for us. It's a calming processing, is that it? And then we feel better.

Bill (27m 24s): Calming is a great word to use for it. We worked with an architect out of Baltimore, and the University, and the neuroscience team at Sulk to do an experiment on what would be the minimal intervention, what would be the lowest cost intervention you could do to have a significant impact for students in an inner city school. And so they did a year-long experiment in a sixth mathematics classroom, to Green Street Academy in West Baltimore. And sixth graders, in a mathematics classroom. And so several steps in the room, it was already an east-facing room on the second floor, so potential really good daylight, although typically blinds are usually left closed most all the time. Teachers are graded by how much content they put on the walls. 

So they cover the walls with posters with formulas and stuff. It turns out the neuroscientist told us that's overstimulating, that's actually counterproductive. The first thing we did was get permission that the teacher could only put up three posters on the wall at a time. You know, that was actually really tough to do because the teachers are graded on how much content they put on the walls. 

Yeah. What the neuroscientists are telling us is “bad”. So we did that and then we added, there was a garden outside, and a landscaper donated some plants and we added to the garden and then made some really simple cosmetic changes in the classroom itself. Carpet tiles went down from interface, we added a pattern that's like waving waves of grass called furry grass. An artist at Designtex, which is part of Steelcase, worked with the neuroscientist to create a new pattern of wallpaper. 

A wallpaper to go around on the top of a classroom in an abstraction of palm leaves. So that gives you the biomorphic forms and the collinear patterns. And then Mecho Shade that makes fabric window shades, silk screened onto their fabric a shadow pattern of a tree branch, it is a statistical fractal on the window shades, and then some of the ceiling tiles were replaced with some wave form ceiling tiles. 

So you used the word calm a few minutes ago. That was the exact words that when the children use the classroom, 122 kids use that classroom, and the teacher, that was the most typical used word in the survey and interviews about their experience in the room. The survey was one way we did measure. 

We also did academic online testing, four times a year the kids have to go through this test. And because it was the same teacher who taught in that classroom multiple years before teaching the exact same curriculum, we could compare test results from prior years, because it's the same test as well. At the beginning of the year in September, the test scores were pretty much the same from the year before. As the kids spent time in that classroom, their performance got better and better so we saw a three-fold increase in the level of performance of kids with that classroom as a biophilic classroom, so that was comparing 125 kids to 122 kids. 

Monica (31m 52s): That’s incredible. What's something like that. like, you know, so I kind of wrote down that sound like there was like, besides the decluttering, there were four sort of changes, that was the flooring, this sort of freeze, the shades, and the ceiling way forms. And you know, this may, because it was a one-off, it may have cost X, but you know, schools are always very concerned about they don't have the budget, but that sounds pretty doable, to be able to recommend that. 

Bill (32m 37s): Schools already use carpet tile, right? So just change that. Wallpaper. Wallpaper is really cheap. Window blinds cost a little bit more but from an energy and energy savings and standpoint and everything else, that's a good investment. So, because we used automation, which was funny because there are times because we were actually told that the kids would want to see outside. So they would go ahead and even though the light conditions weren't perfect, they would go ahead and override and open the blinds. 

Monica (33m 06s): Has this been like, you know, again, I haven't, there's been so much going on in the past year. I haven't totally kept up with the education, public education, but it seems like something as simple as that would be an amazing thing to sort of require either a retrofit or new public education buildings for K through 12. Is that a radical idea?

Bill (33m 40s): Probably hard to require, but it sure would be highly recommended, right? Yeah, no. So since we published the paper almost a year ago, we have been mostly online, but some in person before everything got closed down. Jim Jetterman and myself and others of our team have been making lots of presentations and education conferences and there’s been a lot of interest. 

We also did, you know, we, we only got four months of it, but we actually did diametric testing as well. Just the surveys and the interviews and looking at test scores, we actually want you to see physiologically that it makes a difference. Now we only have months of data because getting permission to do biometric testing on grade school children is complicated. 

So what we did was we picked one class and we had a control classroom down the hallway and picked another math class that was like the exact same time and we did heart rate variability. And so heart rate variability is a good way to tell if you, you know, your stress recovery characteristics. And so what you're looking for is, we did a measurement at the beginning of class and 90 minutes later at the end of class. We did that three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday for 4 months in those two classrooms. 

And what we saw was in the control classroom, the number that the kids start with is pretty much the same at the end. It doesn't really change. But what we saw in the Biophilic classroom was a marked improvement from the beginning to end of class. 

Jennifer (35m 56s): That's unbelievable. So would that then go into the nature of a space? So it's like what you're talking about now at the fractal patterns, does that also mean Nature of a space or is that different? 

Bill (36m 6s): These are just analogs, representations of nature, but the point of this is, think about it. All right. So what's the pattern on my curtains? What's the pattern in my carpet?  

Monica (36m 17s): Yeah I’m looking around my room. 

Bill (36m 22s): Do I have biomorphic forms, do I have fractals? Those are really easy things to do, particularly as more and more folks are going to work at home. And those are easy and inexpensive changes to make. In particular, if you’re renting with removable wallpaper, create a panel, it's a fun fractal pattern. Those are minimal interventions. So that third category, third bucket are the spatial conditions themselves. 

And these are the ones that are actually in some ways what people overlook the most, but response to them is really there. So we started when we wrote the 14 patterns of biophilic design, we have 4 of those patterns. The first one is prospect, that's where I have an unimpeded view through space. And that's really important for wayfinding perceptions of safety and opportunity and interest, definitely lowers our stress. 

There's also a physiological component to that is, particularly if I’m stuck on my computer screen all day long, you’re stuck in the short vision focus, which takes all the muscles in the eye to contract to round the lens to do that. Imagine you're sitting, of course you get a headache because it's muscle fatigue, its muscles are physically tired. 

And if you sit all day doing that, eventually the muscles give up and the lens actually hardens into that shape. So when we do go outside your vision is compromised, it takes a while for the lens to soften. But if I can get you to look up and look away, so that’s less than 3 feet away or less than a meter away is the short vision focus and then there’s an infinite vision focus which is anything more than a hundred feet are more than a 33 meters away from you. And in the infinite vision focus, the lens flattens in the eye to see that. 

When the lens flattens, all the muscles in the eye relax. And if I can get you to look up and look away, now we have a relaxation response and you can create great interior spaces like a hallway or you can create prospect views inside as well. 

So the next condition is one that we definitely see. And that is a condition called refuge. That's where my back is protected. And I have a, I may have some canopy ahead. The classic example would be, that would be you come into a restaurant and you've got the round table. And around the perimeter you have all the booths and it’s really disappointing because all of the booths are already taken. 

And that's really disappointing because yes, we always want the booth, the most desired, right? What do we experience in a booth? Our back is protected, I have a canopy overhead, so I have a refuge and I have a view across the whole rest of the restaurant, so I have prospect and refuge together. So I have to think about in Serenbe, we've got a lot of those houses that has a really great front porches with the balcony with the ceiling overhead. And they’re typically raised up about 18 inches so you can sit there and look all up and down the street and have conversations with people on the street.

So I've got my prospect view and I’m sitting in a refuge. I love that. So those are two of the patterns, prospect and refuge. This was first identified by an English geographer called Jay Appleton way back in the 1970s. The next condition, it's a fun one. It's called mystery. When there’s partially revealed information that you just feel compelled to go explore. So the classic example would be a curving road. 

And it's really interesting, or the curving path in the forest. And if you take kids out on a walk, or go with dogs, they're going to bolt and go running off to see what's around the curb and you’ve got to go catch up, right. Mystery can also be done with sound, or bakeries are really great at that one, smell. 

Monica (41m 54s): Oh yeah, that's a great example. 

Bill (42m 9s): So that’s mystery. Another pattern is a really fun one, it’s Risk/Peril.  One of my favorite examples is in New York, it’s the Guggenheim Museum, you have that amazing spiraling wrap in the center. You get to the top and just have to look over into the center. Right is really good at Risk/Peril. He uses it in a number of different places and he does it well there.  

That railing is legally high enough, but it's also at a height that’s just slightly uncomfortable. When you look over that, it's pretty exhilarating. And it's also very funny, we have pictures of people looking over and you’ll notice that people are back a little ways form the rail and their hands are on it as they’re looking over. So Risk/Peril,  you're not going to fall, but it's still a little more exhilarating. 

Monica (43m 06s): Would that be, you're seeing these crazy towers with these glass bottom pools. Would that be an example of that?

Bill (41m 33s): Ugh, it’s so wrong, but yes. For those of us with a fear of heights, yes.

Monica (43m 20s): But is that a RIsk/Peril or is that just a bad design? 

Bill (43m 23s): No, that’s Risk/Peril. That’s a really good example of Risk/Peril. You know, thinking about the stepping stones through a pond in a Japanese garden. You’ve got to pay attention to make each step so you don't fall into the pond. It’s not so deep that you’re gonna drown but you know, you have to pay attention. So it's creating that Risk/Peril in a really intentional experiential way. 

So those were the four initial patterns. And then there was another pattern that we were really interested in. But when we first did the initial work in the 14 patterns of biophilic design, a lot of our work was, for quite a while, had been supported by Google. Doing science dives to understand these patterns. We wanted to include that one, but at the time there wasn't enough silence. We actually thought the pattern where we were talking about might actually be just multiple patterns being experienced at the same time. 

And it wasn't until fairly recently that we realized that it’s actually a very distinct brain and a physiological response. And that’s that feeling that you get when you walk up to the edge of the grand canyon. You stop, your mouth drops open, your eyes get wide, your heart rate changes. So it's a really distinct brain response. It’s an overload response and multiple sensors in the brain light up and rush forward and then you stop, and get the physical response, but then you also have a psychological cascade that goes with that. And that is that you are humbled and after that experience, you will tend to exhibit much more pro social behavior and be more charitable. And so that's the experience of awe 

Monica (45m 55s): Incredible. Talk about the charitability and being more sociable cause that's so interesting. I remember and seeing the eclipse and nothing I had ever experienced in my life prepared me for that. And, you know, there's these eclipse chasers. And I thought that was crazy town, but now I'm like, yes, if I could just run around the world and see an eclipse, I would do it. It was the most amazing experience. 

Bill (46m 32s): So I was on an airplane during it. And I landed and it was still partial. I landed in San Diego and I walked outside and I was so bummed because I didn’t have glasses and there were people out there right. And this guy just turned to me and said, “here, use mine”

Jennifer (46m 43s): Oh, that's so great. 

Monica (46m 49s): Yeah, that's the perfect example. No, but it was, it was this, we were with a, a, on a rooftop of a hotel in Greenville, like kind of right at the, whatever, line of it. And it was just, you know, we were with a couple friends, but a ton of unknown people. And it was the most amazing, like loving group experience. 

Bill (47m 00s): The funniest experience of charitability, this is actually an experiment that was done where they had people have an awe experience and then they handed them a donation basket. And after the awe experience they put in more money than they did before. 

Jennifer (47m 25s) This is so interesting to me because I’m just fascinated by this topic and that you’re really, there’s so many studies around this. Can you also experience awe just, like for me going for a walk in Central Park and it was just like a beautiful snow covered day, and just the beauty of it is just so profound. Can you find moments of awe even in a simple moment? Is that possible?

Bill (47m 52s): Yeah. And in fact, there are folks who are now doing sort of trainings to take people for a walk in nature and have them have micro experiences of awe. Awe can be created, you know the way that people first think about it would be the grand spaces so the Grand Canyon, or Grand Cathedral, or the Kamakura Buddha, or things like that. 

But music, right. 

Monica (48m 25s): Oh music yes. I hadn’t thought of that.

Bill (48m 29s): Listen to some of the Beethoven symphonies, there are other ways of experiencing awe as well. And it can be done, Frank Lloyd Wright did it. He used a term we called compression and release. So in most Wright houses, the entrance is kind of obscured and is usually small and narrow and low. And think about it, a lot of these were expensive houses and pretty elaborate with beautiful glass work. The entry experience is “ugh”, right? But you then come into the main space of the house and it just sort of opens up around you and so he called that compression and release. 

And here outside of Washington D.C. is a small, one of the early Usonian houses, the Pope-Leighey house, which is open to the public for tours. And you come and it is so low that you can reach up and touch it. And you come into the entrance hall which splits to go to the bedroom either straight to the kitchen and dining room and living room. And as the plane continues in, take a few steps into the foyer and there’s steps down into the dining room and all of a sudden you have this much more expansive space. He did another trick, in that he floated the ceiling plane, there’s continuous clerestory all around the ceiling and canalabor part of the roof, so it looks like the roof is then floating above that. Architecturally it’s fireworks and extraordinary, and it’s a little tiny house.

Monica (50m 42s): Right but I love that term. Architectural fireworks. That's wonderful. One of the things that I think, you know, we really want people to think about is, not only how can you, you know, you know, ask for it or look for it in a corporate business institutional spaces, but bring it into your, into your own personal life. So I love that you say that it doesn't have to be, you know, a trip to, you know, a national park or an, eclipse, that it can be these you know, I think that's an interesting, these micro experiments of Awe, and I think that's a beautiful, or that you can do something simple as put, put a picture on your wall of nature. 

Bill (51m 25s): I mean even just you know, think about having a big, big chair, just a piece of furniture that creates refuge. So they're all, there's a way of access in big and small, expensive and inexpensive. You can create really powerful biophilic experiences without huge places and without huge budgets. 

Monica (51m 58s): Which I think is important. I think, you know, how do you make it more accessible and something that people understand what it is and then how can we bring it into our lives? Do you feel like as we sort of wrap up the conversation, you know, you've been so immersed in it for so many years, but do you feel like it's gaining traction with the mainstream? 

I mean, that's really, our goal is to sort of, if you will, help create or build a Biophilic movement that is, you know, outside, you know, the current industries. 

Monica (52m 42s): One indication for us is that we know in the next three months there are articles coming in. Popular science, Vogue on Biophilic.

Monica (52m 52s): Love it, which is great. And there was an Elle Decor article on it the other day, which I think is phenomenal. But, before we get to tell us about your book, because that's another indicator, the book that you guys came out with in October is now, you just told me before the interview started on its third printing, which is like incredible. Tell us a little bit about the name and title. We'll put it in the show links, but like that's a great indicator. 

Bill (53m 17s): Yeah, sure. The book is called Nature Inside: Biophilic Design Guide. That's by myself and Katie O’Ryan. And it is, it starts with a little history in science and something about the economics and then talks about sort of a process for intimidation, for designers. And then it gets into the examples. The chapters are different mini interiors. So it starts first, before you even get to the interior, it starts with fabric and finishes and fixtures and comments, And then we talk about residences, hotels, classroom's and offices and factories and hospitals, civic buildings and finally to the scale of outside and parks. And then the back of the book is a whole bunch of appendices. If you want to really dig deep and geek out in a science it's there? 

And there are tools we use as designers to help designers do implementation. Yeah, it's filled with color photographs so you get to see. People, we, it was really amazing, we didn’t have a photography budget. Yet, we were able to get, people gave us photographs of, of some really extraordinary buildings all over the world. 

We have a building's from Bali, from Singapore, from the U K, from the US, from Australia, from Denmark and the Netherlands, just all over the world. 

Monica (55m 18s): Yeah. Well, and maybe they've, they've saw something of Awe and they were very collaborative, but I think that that's what we want to see. Right. We want to see collaboration. How can we all work together? Because it's only going to benefit everybody personally, you know, from a planetary, the more we are connected to nature and biophilia, the more we will protect it. 

Jennifer (55m 42s): Yes, that's a bottom line from nature, right? Nature is that connectedness to all, to all living things. So I think that's a great undertone of what nature gives us is like, we want to be more collaborative, so how do we support each other and become healthier being's and healthier spaces because of it? 

Bill (55m 50s): Absolutely. 

Monica (55m 52s): Well, Bill, thank you so much for coming to us today and taking all this time. This was fascinating. I could talk to you for hours on end.

Jennifer (56m 6s): Hours. I wish we had more time! 

Monica (56m 10s): I know and I wanted to get to economics, but we'll talk in more detail about that once that book comes out. 

Bill (56m 12s): Sounds great.

Jennifer (56m 23s): Okay. That was so, so fascinating.  

Monica (56m 26s): I know so much good stuff. 

Jennifer (56m 28s): I love what Bill said about all these ideas being intuitive, because there's so much complex science to back the reasons why biophilic design and nature makes us feel so good, but it's also so instinctual. That's not always something that we're conscious of. 

Monica (56m 35s): I mean, right. The corner booth in a restaurant and why we're transfixed by a fireplace. 

Jennifer (56m 45s): Yes, exactly. All of that. And the example he used about the work he did, the school in Baltimore was absolutely fascinating. 

Monica (56m 52s): Oh, it was incredible. I mean, the calming effect of these really simple, fairly inexpensive cosmetic changes that we're drawing from Biophilia and ideas around nature. It's so great to hear that some of these ideas are catching on in the education field. 

Jennifer (57m 8s): It's amazing. But on the other end of the spectrum, these ideas about Risk/Peril and Mystery are also interesting to me, I've been fascinated. There's a sense of exhilaration, but it's not like you're an actual danger, the stepping stones in a creek or a spiral at the Guggenheim, it's sort of a thrill. I mean, I've done it myself. It's kind of terrifying, but it's not, you know, you're okay. So it's weird, but also fascinating. 

Monica (57m 29s): And the 15th pattern of Awe, that's something we talked about quite a bit in our last episode with Phill Tabb as well. And now that it's its own pattern with such a distinct physiological response where your eyes widen, change in heart rate and how it makes us more social and charitable, it makes so much sense, but it's also such a wild concept. 

Jennifer (57m 46s): Exactly. So wild. I cannot wait to have him back again.

Monica (57m 49s): I know. What a great guest. Well, I guess that's it for today, Jennifer? 

Jennifer (57m 50s): I think so, till next time. 

Monica (57m 51s): All right. See you later.