Building Design: A Tool for Mental Wellness

Ripe for transformation, mental health makes national headlines—upticks in anxiety and depression, the growing demand for behavioral health services, and the silver tsunami challenging us to find better support for an aging population. While healthcare spaces have traditionally been charged with caring for our mental wellbeing—places to diagnose and treat a spectrum of concerns from autism and eating disorders to memory loss and substance abuse, a more human design approach uncovers interventions across several typologies to more empathetically and intuitively respond to our mental, behavioral and emotional needs.

Exchanging best practices and expanding our notion of mental health, we’ll explore how the built environment can be activated to better support our individual and collective mental health. From office design that finds inspiration from classrooms to meet the needs of a neurodiverse workforce to how to design for emotional safety and trust, this is the future of a kinder, more human built environment.