BERKELEY, Calif. — For many young patients, harsh lights, bare walls, and windows facing parking lots or brick buildings make already painful hospital visits more unpleasant, stoking fear and uncertainty instead of hope. Often, those patients say, it makes recovery harder.
Their perspectives — historically overlooked in hospital design — are at the heart of a budding movement to make architecture more inclusive for the people who actually spend time there. Hospital groups like UCSF Benioff Children’s and Boston Children’s are exploring ways to fold young patients’ feedback into hospital design, like the color of walls and the placement of windows, art, and couches.
The field of “neuroarchitecture” isn’t new. But these days, health systems and their architects are increasingly realizing that building and room design impacts well-being, said Haripriya Sathyanarayanan, a Berkeley Architecture and Building Science Ph.D. candidate leading a research project using virtual reality to gauge how comfortable pediatric patients are in hospital rooms.
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