Being Outside Inside

Making inside the better outside! Giving back priority to people’s needs in buildings and bringing the experience to nature in buildings. That’s what we are investigating in our project ‘Being Outside Inside’.

We started with a focus on buildings in health care. We have 2 reasons for this:

  • In healthcare, functions such as living, working and recreation come together. This makes it possible to extrapolate the results to buildings with one of these functions.
  • Residents of care buildings have fewer opportunities to go outside independently. For example, they often have limited mobility and depend on care. This makes buildings in which they can still experience the benefits of nature and ‘being outdoors’ extra important.

Healthcare will also face a number of major challenges in the coming decades. For example, the double aging of the population has a strong impact on the availability and affordability of healthcare. At the same time we are placing higher demands on our living environment. This means that there is increasing attention for prevention and we must look for new and hybrid residential-care solutions in which the quality of life must be as high as possible and while the demand for care is as low as possible.

We are convinced that getting people back in touch with nature is part of the solution. We have already been able to research this hypothesis and started by asking 3 main questions:

  • What happens in nature?
  • What is important when working in healthcare?
  • What is important when living in a care building?

The answers to these questions will help us to define which nature elements can be integrated in buildings to improve the work and live experience in healthcare. A literature study and discussions with environmental psychologists, ecologists, architects, health experts and pioneers show that a positive experience of nature depends on the extent to which people experience natural variation and are in contact with nature through their senses.

Based on this, we defined 6 themes that enhance the natural experience of building users. Design strategies that take these themes into account create a building that reconnects people with nature:

Quake Being Outise Inside visual.png

The next step is to collect and think of design strategies to integrate the themes above in buildings. These are passive, low-tech and nature-inclusive strategies that contribute to the experience of nature in a building.

Want to know more? Contact the team! Charley Meyer cmeyer@abtwassenaar, André Meijer a.meijer@abt.eu, Lisette Rueb l.rueb@abt.eu, Maarten Visser m.visser@bbn.nl, Maria Sara di Maggio m.d.maggio@abt.eu, Koen Post k.post@bbn.nl

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