Biophilic Office Design: What is It?
Planteria Group
Experts in Plants & Flowers for Businesses. Biophilic Design for your workplace. We design, install & maintain 🌿🌷
What is Biophilic Design?
Biophilic Design is the active process of including natural, sustainable elements in design and architecture, with proven benefits to mental health, productivity and creativity to name just a few. Biophilic design is essentially a design framework that intertwines the patterns of nature into the built environment, strengthening the human-nature connection. What makes this work is the effective incorporation of natural elements such as stone, wood, indoor plants, living green walls and water features into the interior environment.
The word biophilia means love of life and living things: bio = life and philia = the love of something, the opposite of phobia, the concept that we as humans have an innate desire to be connected to nature.
Why is Biophilic Design Important?
Many studies have been made over the past few decades which show that Biophilic Design is highly beneficial with direct positive impacts on health and wellbeing, productivity, creativity, healing rates, value perception, staff retention and decreased absenteeism.
When all the features of biophilic design are combined correctly, what is created is a workplace that optimises employee performance, health and wellbeing, helping organisations reach peak physical and mental performance. Through our innate desire to protect and nurture that which feeds us and sustains us physically and emotionally, we instinctively connect with natural features such as plants, fresh air and water.
Whilst this may seem a financial luxury given the pressures on most organisations, economic reasons are actually one of the key drivers for the growing biophilic trend. As organisations become more aware of the value of investing in employee health, wellbeing and performance, the value of creating a workplace that fosters and improves this is seen as a sound economic policy.
At Planteria, we work closely with Designers and Architects, Office and Facilities Managers, Property Managers and Hospitality to include biophilic elements for offices and commercial spaces. Our goal is to recommend innovative planting ideas for your unique situation and make your vision become a reality by taking into consideration your environment and lighting levels to find the best plant specimens that will thrive and add beauty.
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Nature is a powerful antidote to stress. If you think about how different you feel when you are in a city centre location, compared with how you feel when you are in a rural, natural setting, for example walking through a field or sitting in your garden, you’ll already begin to understand the concept of biophilia and the positive emotional and physical impact it has on you.
Being in nature helps us to feel calm, peaceful, and happier. This mental state, in turn, improves our health, directly affecting heart rate and blood pressure and positively impacting the healthy functioning of our autonomic nervous system, the operating system that keeps us in a state of balance and runs all major functions in our body.
In today’s fast-paced world of work, we are all aware of the impact that stress can have on our mental and physical wellbeing. Stress has been dubbed the “Health Epidemic of the 21st Century” by the World Health Organisation. Biophilic design can help improve wellbeing by creating a calmer and more relaxing environment helping to connect us back to nature, making us more able to cope with external stressors.
Find out more about the future of the workplace and biophilic design and get in touch with Planteria to benefit from decades of experience, knowledge and design expertise in indoor and outdoor planting.
Additional Information About Biophilic Design: