Designing Positivity: Leveraging neuroscience to optimise well-being in the workplace

Mary Lee Duff, Director of Strategy, IA Interior Architects and Su-San Tan, Director, Workplace Strategy & Insights, Space Matrix, explain how design and interior architecture of an office environment, can boost mood and inspire positivity in the workplace

Although Covid-19 is one of the greatest global challenges we have faced in modern times—upending every facet of our lives, from the domestic sphere to the workplace—it also presents an opportunity to redesign our world for the better: to rethink our spaces and space-related practices to be more equitable and human-centered.

In fact, research shows that history’s most devastating pandemics helped push societal norms and artistic output in a more egalitarian direction. “Each epidemic elicited a change in design ethos and philosophy,” says Mette Shenker, a design director at IA. Consider the Black Death, which broke out in 1346 and stretched from Europe to the Middle East to Asia. Affecting people of all socioeconomic brackets equally, the plague was ultimately a force of democratisation, breaking down hierarchies and creating greater awareness of humans as individuals.

This change was reflected in the built environment: In contrast to Gothic architecture, with its somewhat ostentatious aesthetic and scale designed to inspire awe (and even fear) of the institutions these edifices represented, early- Renaissance structures dating from the late 14th century were more humanist and humanising. “After the Black Death, architecture and art pivoted away from stories about the elite classes and more to the laymen,” Shenker explains. “Many great thinkers emerged during this period of time, and architecture became a social movement, more about the user than about the impact on the viewer.”