Evidence-Based Design

Promoting Better Health through Transformative Design Solutions

During the past five years the understanding that psychology is directly correlated to environment has delivered an entirely new way to facilitate interior design. The core principle behind evidence-based design is that every square foot of a design is tied directly to how clients want their own customers to feel at each location in the building. This organizing principle has had an incredible impact on the design of healthcare facilities, which are most often associated with negative emotions for patients.

A design company cannot claim expertise in the healthcare sector without solid knowledge of evidence-based design. Similar to the way doctors diagnose sickness, this process requires that all choices for the future be based on facts that are currently known to be true. In other words, evidence-based design takes all known factors into account, rather than relying on trial and error tactics.

The Center for Health Design serves as the primary resource for the principles of evidence-based design. This organization coined the term ‘evidence-based design’ and continuously monitors different projects to produce concrete research and evidence that is helpful to designers in this field.

The following are excerpts from an article published in 1998:

“Each of us can relate to our own stories where our activities, thoughts, or purpose were impacted by the external environment. The environment around us can set a mood, create a barrier, provide a distraction, give us pleasure or cause us harm. Yet, it is surprising to find that little systematic research has been done examining the impact of the healthcare environment on its consumers--patients, family members and clinicians. How these consumers are impacted by the physical or built environment is poorly understood. Heretofore, we have not had answers to questions such as: What do patients notice in the physical environment when they go to a doctor's office, a hospital, or a nursing home? What stands out in their minds? What gets in the way? What matters most to them? What impact does the built environment have on them? To answer these questions, The Center for Health Design and The Picker Institute went directly to the primary source.

Throughout healthcare, patients and family members are increasingly recognized as the "experts" about the subjective quality of their experience--what matters, what makes them feel better, and what they need to help them recover, heal, and adapt to significant changes in their lives. Because they are truly the only individuals who can tell us this information, as we work to create "life-enhancing" environments in healthcare, we must understand how patients and their families experience those environments and what it is about them that matters to them most.”

For more than a decade, The Center for Health Design has been promoting the idea that using evidence-based design in hospitals and healthcare facilities to create healing environments can improve the quality of healthcare.