Book Review: Happy By Design

This is a guest post by Transport Advisor and Town Planner George Weeks, written in a personal capacity reviewing Happy By Design by Ben Channon Revised Edition.

You can check out past book review posts here.

Where’s your favourite place in Auckland? What about it makes you tick? How do you feel when you go there? Why do you keep going back?

These questions are all examples of Environmental Psychology, an established academic discipline that is not particularly well known, yet universally relevant. It’s a science that studies the impact of our surroundings on our minds and bodies.

We have all met cynics who dismiss emotions – particularly about buildings – as “nice-to-have”, “fluff” and “subjective”, but most people will agree that humans respond to their environments. Our relationship with the built and natural environment determines our memories, our behaviour and our lives. It affects our mental wellbeing and the success of a city, in a positive or negative way.

Architect Ben Channon turns theory into practice with his book Happy by Design. This pocket-sized tome examines seven themes that universally determine how people feel about their surroundings. These themes can inform the design of anything, from a bookshelf, to a building, to a city.

All – and I mean all – the assertions in this book are supported by academic and/or professional literature. Notes and references occupy 33 pages; roughly 20% of the book’s total length and are presented in the same accessible and readable style. While mainly focussed on buildings, the lessons contained within are equally applicable to the spaces in between them, i.e. urban design.

As with the Old Testament, we start with light. We need it – particularly daylight – just try staying in a hotel with no windows. Different colours and intensities of artificial light can generate different reactions, while a well-placed lamp can invite people to sit and relax. Look how the outdoor lighting at a luxury resort makes guests feel calm and welcome. Auckland’s Wynyard Crossing uses the same approach.

From light, Chapter 2 moves to comfort which (p.27) “…plays a vital role in helping us to reax and feel calm and safe, all of which are key to happiness.” Tactile buildings invite us to touch them; look at the popularity of the Kawakawa public toilets, designed by tactile architecture künstler Friedrich Hundertwasser. The sense of touch is often overlooked, but is fundamental to comfort; compare a warm soft chair with a cold hard bench.

Discomfort can come from noise, which can ruin a person’s mental wellbeing. Acoustic insulation can make the difference between a happy building and an awful hellhole – architects should read Medium by Professor Guy Marriage. Want a happier place? Reduce or remove uncontrolled noise.

Chapter 3 develops this theme into Control of your surroundings. A lack of control in an urban area can be distressing, but control can be given via simple things like moveable public chairs. Feelings of control and choice bring happiness. At work, successful office design gives people control with different types of spaces. We learn also about privacy and personalised spaces; rare privileges in a world of open-plan hot-desking.

A good way to increase privacy, particularly in dense residential areas, is to use street trees, and this brings us onto Chapter 4: Nature, probably the best-known aspect of environmental psychology.

Humans’ innate appreciation of nature has been proven beyond reasonable doubt. Hospital patients who can see trees recover more quickly. Exposure to nature affects blood pressure, heart rate variability, pain levels and other physiological measures.

Cities have for centuries provided parks and greenspace to relieve stress and provide amenity. Even a small park can provide an “ahh” moment; respite and joy. It is no coincidence that the most desirable neighbourhoods in Auckland are characterised by the abundance of parks and/or access to water.

Chapter 5 tackles Aesthetics. While acknowledging that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there are rules on colour, proportionality and design that reliably elicit happiness. Classical and Modern architecture both rely heavily on pleasing proportions. Aesthetics can deliver moments of joy and these can be as simple as a flash of colour as in Alvar Alalto’s Paimio Sanatorium or the Greenhouse by Ockham. The aesthetics of streets can make a city legible; easy to understand and enjoy

Physical Activity is essential to our wellbeing, and this is covered in Chapter 6. Design choices can enable us to use our bodies, such as wide footways to prioritise pedestrians. There’s also a page on designing for cycling, to enable independence, control and wellbeing. Spaces designed for inactivity are also vital for wellbeing; quiet, inviting and restful; a place to think; a phrontistery.

Chapter 7 – Psychology – examines the many other things that affect our wellbeing. The importance of storage in a home. The value of high ceilings in at least part of a building. Placing bedrooms upstairs, in a place of refuge (see: prospect and refuge theory). Entrances that are attractive and easy to find (it is amazing how often this is overlooked). Fundamentally, does the design enhance our humanity?

Happy by Design ends by drawing the threads together into a bulleted list of conclusions. For the hardened cynic who remains convinced that designing for mental wellbeing is “irrelevant”, we learn of a building by Landsec (one of the UK’s major commercial property developers) where a WELL certified building raised productivity by 20%. Similar savings occur from acoustic-insulation and other features that increase contentment, reduce turnover, increase desirability and add value.

This is important at a city scale. Places that are disengaging to people and/or fail to elicit positive emotions are throwing opportunities away. Happy by Design empowers us to assess the built environment objectively, from the perspective of the user (i.e. us).

Happy by Design is important because it explains how relatively small decisions about the built environment can have major impacts on our wellbeing. The quality of the human experience determines the appeal and viability of a street, neighbourhood, town or city.

Look at Auckland’s new City Rail Link (CRL) stations. Spacious, attractive and incorporating public art. Does this cost money? Of course. Will this attention to detail make millions of people feel good? Yes – every time they use the station, whether or not they notice it consciously. Civic design should generate civic pride.

The strictures of austerity and a joyless minimum viable product may satisfy those who preach ugliness as a “rational” response. But really, this is an irrational response. Human beings react to their surroundings. To expect identical behaviour in two completely different settings (e.g. a Moorish palace and an Ibizan moshpit) is highly unrealistic.

Tools within environmental psychology like behavioural and sensory mapping (as used by Willam Whyte and Jan Gehl) have shown what this means in more detail. Major architecture practices such as  Foster + Partners employ environmental psychologists to add value to their clients’ projects, with specialists for the building/interior scale and public/urban interface. And it’s not just the big firms; it’s true for growing practices like 3XN/GXN and Perkins and Will. Environmental psychology is objective; we ignore it at our peril.

Happy By Design connects the science of environmental psychology to professional practice and does so in a thoroughly accessible style. A follow-up book could look in more depth at the public realm. It could also introduce the Circumplex Model, as a means to quantify feelings as positive/negative and activated/deactivated, thus helping the reader to make their own judgements. It would also be interesting to explore environmental psychology’s relationship with related disciplines, such as neuroarchitecture.

By understanding how our environment makes us tick, we can understand its human dimensions in terms of health and connections. We can choose to support our humanity with comfortable, welcoming environments, or fight it by creating harsh, impersonal, stressful spaces. In other words, humans shape our environment. Let’s create places that make us feel good.

All illustrations (except CRL station) by Ben Channon; taken from Happy By Design.

Greater Auckland’s work is made possible by generous donations from our readers and fans.

We’re now a registered charity, so your donations are tax-deductible. If you’d like to support our work you can join our circle of supporters here.

Share this