How does a wellbeing designer leverage Daylight in a healthy building?
Natural daylight is one of the most important elements in green building interiors, an essential building block of health and wellness interior design”. In addition to synchronizing us with our circadian rhythms, natural light has been found to promote an improvement in mood, alertness, concentration, and faster cognitive processing. For academic learning or professional work environments, natural light has been proven in numerous studies to reduce absenteeism, increase job satisfaction and productivity, and even increase student test scores.
Daylight has also been shown to increase patient recovery times, which from a healthcare perspective can provide a multitude of other indirect benefits. In addition, one study showed that indoor spaces with daylighting contained fewer bacteria than those without (WELL Building Standard). Daylight can be incorporated into a healthy building through strategies such as adequate windows, sidelights, and skylights, integrating illuminance and natural daily rhythms into a space.
Thankfully, the link between lighting and human health is already well-studied and solutions are available on the market. One example is circadian lamps.These LED lamps are designed to promote alertness, performance, and well-being by using colo r temperature, lighting level, and timing to align natural human rhythms (our internal clock ) with the world around us.In other words, the right amount of the right light at the right time.
In addition to solely the volume and intensity of light being brought into a space, when incorporating windows, considerations such as the quality of external views also matter, and indeed whether the windows are operable. Natural landscapes or views onto internal gardens provide additional biophilic benefits, while operable windows can provide natural ventilation advantages.
