2.4 BIOPHILIC DESIGN AS A DESIGN PRACTICE

Biophilic design as a practice is largely misunderstood. Many assume that it is just a landscape strategy or just an aspect of interior design, or that it is synonymous with sustainability. Some even deny seeing its relation to the built environment and argue it has no effect on actual built design. As a design strategy, however, biophilic design is related to all of these topics but does not fit nicely into any one box. This practice goes beyond being only a landscape design strategy or only an interior design strategy. It has links to sustainability and some of the practices are sustainable but it is not exclusively sustainable in every implementation and is not intended to be. Additionally, built design is a crucial part of the practice of biophilic design, specifically with practices rooted in the experience of space and place. Ultimately, biophilic design is a combination of landscape, interior, and built design that enables a connection to nature and is focused on the human benefit from our relationship with our environment, not necessarily the other way around. Inherently, the need to connect to nature does relate to the need for sustainability and environmental stewardship, but as design practices, they differ. To stand on its own, biophilic design establishes itself as a practice that unites multiple disciplines of design to best facilitate the human-nature connection within our built environment, through the use of direct experiences of nature, indirect experiences of nature, and experiences of space and place that link back to our evolutionary development as a species.