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Psychological Design: How Environments Predict Our Psychology, Behavior, and Ability to Thrive | Jan Golembiewski, Revisited
01:08:04
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- [00:04]
A
You don't necessarily have to provide opportunities for people to find meaningfulness in their own lives. People have a natural tendency to find meaningfulness. What's so much more important is getting rid of meaninglessness. And you'll never find meaninglessness quite so evident as we find it in some aspects of the built environment, particularly in institutions. If you've ever gone and visited a prison or a mental health facility, you know exactly what meaninglessness is all about because it's writ large in every fitting in the way they design places. It's seriously disturbing. Get rid of deliberate looking meaninglessness and already you're on the right foot.
- [00:53]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. This episode with Jan Golimbiefski changed the direction of Work for Humans. Those of us who design complex systems like the ones that create work, can learn a lot from physical design. Jan introduced me to the concept of soludogenic architecture, which is buildings whose very physical design makes those who inhabit them healthier and happier. Every building comes with a set of expectations. Students are quiet in a library, but loud on a playground. Adults are focused in their desk chairs, but chatty on bar stools. Witnessing how conventional building design could limit the choices of those inside, Jan Golimbievsky began to leverage design psychology to improve the lives of different groups, from inmates in penitentiaries to the elderly within nursing homes. In this episode, Jan and I talk about the unique design approach called solutogenesis, which designs architecture and workplaces where people can not only survive, but thrive. We also discuss balancing affordances and choices in design narratives embedded in architecture, whether or not money driven design affects livability, the effect that spaces have on work, as well as other topics. All right, if you enjoy this episode, don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And now I bring you Dr. Jan Golimbiefski. Golembiewski. Welcome to Work for Humans.
- [02:34]
A
Thank you so much, Das.
- [02:36]
B
It's great to have you here. I love to have people on the show who work on architecture, and a part of the reason why I love to do that is because it's a way to explore sometimes very abstract architectural concepts in a way that manifest in such a material fashion that we can experience and have experienced that these more abstract concepts around design are much easier to understand. You've been working a lot in the area of solutogenesis. Salutogenesis. I had never heard of it before reading your work. That's what I want to explore today because I think there's a lot of things that we can learn from your work that we might be able to apply to the design of work. So what is salutogenesis, and how is it a different approach to health? How is it a different approach to design?
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A
Okay, big question, great question, but a very big one. Solution? Genesis. There's no correct pronunciation. It's a word that's written. It's like Latin. I just call it salutogenesis, but I can call it salutogenesis. It is a theory that was proposed by an Israeli American academic called Aaron antonovsky in the 1970s. He had been the director of a large Israeli hospital, but he was a sociologist, and he had been fascinated by the logotherapy of Viktor Frankl and kind of fascinated by the stories that had emerged from the Holocaust that some people thrived while other people perished incredibly quickly given exactly the same circumstances. Viktor Frankl was in the middle of it. And being one of the founders of Israel shortly after the war, Aaron Antonovsky, you got to hear a lot of these stories and was kind of fascinated. He was a sociologist, but he was put in charge of a large hospital, I think Ben Gurion Hospital. And he was interested in this question of what makes people thrive while other people perish quickly when all the external circumstances are identical. And he thought that if he could figure out this theory, he might be able to bring it into the hospital and the way that the hospital worked in order to make the hospital function better. So he developed this theory, and then he continued to develop the theory until he died. So it changed a little bit during his life, and by the time he finished, he was a professor at Berkeley University in California. And so the theory is relatively simple in its basics, and it is that we require a certain amount of resources just to get through life, to negotiate the life that we lead, and also to have a reason to do so. So there's basic manageability, what Daniel Pink calls autonomy, maybe, or something very close to it. There is what Daniel Pink again, called mastery. But Aaron Antonovsky was talking about as comprehensibility. And then there is purpose, which Antonovsky referred to as meaningfulness. And they're very, very close analogs. And he used this map to say that, look, people have purpose. People who have meaningfulness in their existence have incredible resilience. But even people who have a way of being a passage through life, know how to negotiate it, have greatly improved resilience. And then the very basic level of resilience, which is one that we all intuitively understand, is the basic manageability, the ability to do the things that we need to do ourselves.
- [06:48]
B
First of all, you might rehabilitate Daniel Pink for me, because for me I find Daniel Pink to be sort of indisputable, but so high level and vague that I can't apply it to design. But to get there, I first want to read some of the things I read about Antonovsky and what he meant by comprehensible and manageable and meaningful. And so comprehensible events make sense is the way he said it. He put parentheses or I put parentheses. I can't tell what I wrote. And he wrote cognitive resources. So these are cognitive resources. To make sense of the world then manageable is to have physical resources. And meaningful is that the challenges are worthwhile and that this is not about cognitive resources or physical resources. Meaningful is about effective resources or at least the ability to be emotionally resilient.
- [07:52]
A
Yes, and all of these, all of his resources are about various levels of resilience. And when you don't have one, you can usually compensate by having another. So if you have a great deal of physical resources, you can get away with having fewer meaningfulness resources. You might not have the quality of life, but on some level you have an admirable quality of life. You see that theoretically with lots of stars, they have pretty horrible sounding lives, but at least they get to drive nice cars and so they're not going to fall off their perch anytime soon. So by having resources in one area it can compensate, but not having resources in another area. And what he talks about is where failure happens. The failure happens at the level of deficits, where you have insufficient resources and he groups those insufficiencies into those three buckets. But it's a model, right? And the only way that you can get a model that's perfectly accurate is by having the whole world. It's a map.
- [08:59]
B
And are these what he calls generalized resistance resources? These are like taken together, they're like your collective resources.
- [09:08]
A
Yes, exactly. We can divide them into cognitive, physical and emotional. It's kind of convenient, it's a nice way of dividing the pie. But I'm sure that other people can divide them differently because it's a map.
- [09:22]
B
And then there are things that essentially attack those resources that are the challenge that those resources help you resist against. In our environment, absolutely.
- [09:38]
A
We talk about providing for those resources. And I talk about that a lot in my work, and it's talked about a lot among people who understand solution genesis, providing for those resources. But what's even more important than providing for those resources is removing the things that directly challenge those resources. So you don't necessarily have to provide opportunities for people to find meaningfulness in their own lives. People have a natural tendency to find meaningfulness in their own lives. And you don't really need to provide too much. It's great if you can. But what's so much more important is getting rid of deliberate looking meaninglessness. And you'll never find meaninglessness quite so evident as we find it in some aspects of the built environment, particularly in institutions. If you've ever gone and visited a prison or a mental health facility, you know exactly what meaninglessness is all about because it's writ large in every fitting in the way they design places. It's seriously disturbing. So you get rid of those things, you get rid of deliberate looking meaninglessness. And already you're on the right foot.
- [10:58]
B
And I want to talk about what the right foot is because one of the things that. Now I'm going to start saying salutogenesis, but I'm going to stick to my guns and say salutogenesis is that unlike a lot of health, which is about let's find the disease, let's fix the disease, it's about creating an environment where in which there is ease, the opposite of dis. Ease. And the reason that this is important, and it's important, I think, in a lot of fields where people are trying to create change is that we feel that the only way we can create change is by saying, everything's terrible, everything is terrible. There's a burning platform we must jump now or it's going to be a disaster. And so on and so forth. And this starts from saying, let's not only fix what's broken, let's extend what makes us healthy. Let's create environments that create health. Salutogenesis. So it's a very different positioning.
- [11:54]
A
The difference is, if I wanted to use a cooking metaphor, the difference is having food that is basically filling and something that's delicious with nourishing somewhere in between.
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B
I would even go farther. It's making food that doesn't give you food poisoning.
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A
That's okay.
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B
I mean, right? I mean, it's like. And this is one of the things that I've said about design before, which is that a great chef isn't someone who really, really doesn't give you food poisoning. That's not what a great chef is. A great chef doesn't give you food poisoning and does something extraordinary beyond that.
- [12:31]
A
You're pointing to something very real here. And it's a great indictment on many of the architects that are in my profession that they're producing these buildings that reek of meaninglessness, that are completely incomprehensible and where basic needs are often not properly met. Creating architectures that structure this in for our most vulnerable people, people with mental illness, people with health problems like our hospitals, and people who are on the periphery of society and in prison, we're making it worse for them. And these architects, do they know what they're doing? Are they doing this deliberately? I've never quite understood how people even get the contracts, how they even survive as architects with such poor quality work. It's like a chef who literally poisons everyone that they feed.
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B
Well, it helps to build buildings that people have no choice but use, I suppose.
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A
Okay, right.
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B
You sort of have a monopoly on their use in some way.
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A
Yeah, but you don't have monopoly on the design. There are plenty of architects out there.
- [13:42]
B
But I was going to say that there's a very direct correlate here, which is that I o psychology kind of has two chunks to it, industrial and organizational psych. One of them, one chunk is how do we measure skills and how do we create motivation to extract the most value out of the population of employees? And then there's another chunk which is, and how do we do it without doing any harm? And that's about, let's not put people in the hospital, let's not give people mental disorders. But there's really very little in IO psychology about thriving, about how do we create a working environment in which people feel whole and alive. So I think there's something very similar.
- [14:24]
A
Well, I'm designing workplaces. A lot of my work is designing workplaces. And I definitely believe that the built environment can make people thrive, can really help, at least take for example, a home for dementia. A normal home for people suffering from dementia is fairly horrible. And they often have a staff station in the middle. And then the people with dementia come up every 10 minutes and ask about where their sister is, and they forget that they've asked that question just five minutes ago. And it becomes really, really horrible for the people who work there. But if you create an environment which is genuinely engaging and actually captures the imagination and the attention of the people who are living there, they stop asking those questions. They stop looking to the staff as their only entertainment. It makes it a lot easier for the staff, a lot more pleasant for the staff. And the staff can suddenly see that people are coming into this place quite sick, but they're starting to behave in ways that resemble normality. In other words, they're getting better and if people who are in the caring professions start seeing people actually recover or behaving as if they're recovering, it's genuinely heartwarming. You know, it genuinely gives them meaning to be there. It gives them purpose. And so we can create a thriving environment. And part of a thriving environment is getting the staff out of the center. You don't put them in staff stations in the middle of the center. You take them right out. They can look in, but people can't see them until they're needed. And when they are needed, they should be there as peers, as pedestrians.
- [16:14]
B
Let's start talking about examples of salutogenic architecture, like you're doing right now, which is. I read in your work that oftentimes it's thought of sort of simply like, let's have views of nature or views into vegetation. And I thought this was really nice, actually, which is, let's have the presence of pet animals, which I think of nursing homes that I've been to. There's been no animals. There's been no pets at all. But I think one of the things you wrote is that, yeah, that's a good start, but there's a lot more that's involved. So can you describe examples of how solidogenesis is expressed in architecture?
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A
You point to the first two big things. For most architects, solutogenesis isn't much more than views of nature. For most people, it's highly salutogenic. It does provide for opportunities to see beyond the present and look to something that's more purposeful, more meaningful. Views of nature, animals that they can care for. Right. They've been studied very widely. There's a strong evidence base for having animals around and for having views of nature. And that evidence base has been around since the 1970s. And so architects like to reach for it, and they know it's a safe area. But I like to look. Use the same theory to look well beyond that and go, okay, what's working here? I grew up in the jungle in Papua New guinea, and I suspect that for most people in the jungle in Papua New guinea, views of nature would be taken absolutely for granted. They've never had anything else take it away. On the other hand, yeah, you've got a problem. But views of nature, if people have always had views of nature, isn't going to be particularly salutogenic. And if there's a bird in a cage, well, that's very likely to end up as dinner. Right? They have a different perspective, and that's a major cultural difference, and that's reality. But we have to abstract out. When we're talking about a center that is for more than one person, if there's going to be 150 residents, we have to abstract it. And the easiest levels to abstract are the more basic ones. Manageability is very easy to abstract because people are of an approximate size. They're between 4 foot and 7 foot or whatever it is. I don't know exactly where the normal curve fits. But if you have cupboards that people can open and they can reach, and you can have floors that people can move across and they accept their wheelchairs and Zimmer frames, you've done a lot of the work for manageability people can manage, especially in a residential home where they don't even have to cook someone's cooking for them. Right. I think that's a problem, but never mind. It is very basic level of manageability. Comprehensibility is a little bit harder and more specific because if you're going to give people a sense of mastery over their environment, how they can negotiate their environment and get the most out of their environment, you have to know what they want. And for most people in an institution, what they want is to actually leave the institution. So what are you going to do? Tell them how to get out? Well, no. So in my practice, one of my methods is give them better things to do. Give them something to really get into and really focus on. So they go, oh, leave, look. Yeah, okay, we'll leave. But can I first finish my. This, that, this and that? And then there's this thing. Right. There's a lot to do here. I don't want to leave. And along with that, you can take a lot of John Zyzl's beautiful work, which is about. Often about hiding any affordances that are opportunities to act, hiding any that aren't beneficial. So an exit is something that you can't see the exits to. All of his facilities have wallpaper over their front doors, so they look like part of the wall. They're often behind a pot plant as well. They're hiding the negatives and reinforcing the positives.
- [20:44]
B
There's a little bit of a disturbing thing there with work, when I think about work, which is essentially, I just remember not taking jobs that would pay me more money because I had such interesting things to do inside the company that I was in, and I wanted to finish what I was doing and I was learning so fast and such big things that I really wanted to stay. And so that's not a bad thing. But the idea that there was an exit that I didn't take is a little bit unnerving. But you used a word, and I wanted to call it out, which is affordances. And so one of the things you wrote is that salutogenesis is expressed in architecture through affordances. And that is a word that I know I use wrong.
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A
Oh, okay.
- [21:28]
B
Or a lot of people use wrong. And maybe I'm right and I don't know. So affordance, as I understand it, is. It's an opportunity to act. That's apparent to you. Is that about right? Which is that the door says push, and so you know what to do with it. But if it doesn't say push, you don't know which way it swings and its affordance is decreased. Or if you can't even tell that it's a door, it's lost its affordance. So first of all, is that the right use of affordance?
- [22:00]
A
It's part of it. Because affordances don't just afford action. They also afford contemplation. Affordances offer opportunities for physical action, for getting something done, and for emotional action as well.
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B
What are a few examples of affordances?
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A
Okay. For a religious person, their opportunity to go to a particular shrine is an opportunity to go to a very particular emotional state. Spiritual state, perhaps. It's even more than emotional. Right. The affordance of Lourdes for a Catholic is something that is going to be really intense. They might have some sort of spiritual revelation while they're there. That's not unusual. It happens all the time. But you go and send somebody who isn't a Catholic to Lourdes and what they see is a riverbed, or they might pick up on the vibe as well. I don't know.
- [22:59]
B
And are affordances intended or can they be accidental?
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A
Affordances are right through. So all of our actions, all of our thoughts operate around affordances. And that goes from our most instinctive ones, the mother's boob, when you get out of the womb. Right. It's an affordance. We're not taught that the boob is what we need. It's innate. The affordance of air to allow us to breathe. It's one of those innate things. But we also learn affordances, and they're stored in the same part of the brain, incidentally.
- [23:35]
B
So I like that because a part of what it does is it says that what I'm building, when I'm building architecture, is I'm building a collection of affordances, that if I'm not building affordances, I'm failing.
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A
You're always building affordances. It's what affordances you're building. So if you're building prison, the affordances tend to work the other way. They're opportunities to make people feel smaller. They're opportunities to make people feel disempowered, to feel guilty. I had to visit a friend who was in prison the other day and it was weird. I mean, I was. I'm very tuned to architecture, as you can imagine, especially architecture of institutions. And I could really feel how the physical environment is designed to make me, an individual, feel guilty, which is a really interesting thing. Imagine if you are guilty, how guilty you feel. All I was guilty of is visiting a friend, which is actually a nice thing to do.
- [24:38]
B
How did it do that?
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A
It does it through. First of all, the workplace itself, the rules around it are designed to offer you no trust. You're not even trusted to move in a straight line forward. Every other opportunity to move to the right or left is barred locked doors or just corridors without doors. You have to move exactly through the process as the process has been designed. So there are affordances, there is a door, but there's only one door. There's no choice. Choice is a really important thing and something that I write a lot about. It isn't something that turns up in the literature a great deal, but it's something that I really like to celebrate. I believe that in design we should always be giving people choices, especially if that is institutional residential design. At any given time of day or night, people should be given choices of what to do. You're awake at night, what can you do? You can do this or you can do that. They both have to be positive, life affirming choices. And if you've got a choice, then there is a choice. Otherwise it's a choice of either do this or just go and sit in the seat and suffer when that's no choice at all.
- [26:03]
B
I don't know if choice and autonomy are identical. They're very close.
- [26:07]
A
They are. Certainly they are. But I think that autonomy is a very basic level of choice or can be a very basic level of choice. Yours is the choice to turn left or right, that's autonomy. But if you know that left or right, it's essentially the same thing, what's the choice? I believe that choice is something that's really structured into our very being. From the days of when we used to have our harvest and have our harvest festivals. There was the time when we could actually choose. We could actually stop and celebrate our victories, celebrate what's great about our lives. Whereas in evolution, we don't actually get many opportunities for choice. Do you think that if you're a predator in the savannah, you. I feel like gazelle tonight, you know? No, you eat what you catch.
- [27:07]
B
I want to continue on the idea of affordances because in one of our communications, you mentioned a book. What I had said was. I said, how about Christopher Alexander's idea that architecture that makes us feel whole and alive is characterized by the events that keep on happening there? And what you said is that that idea is predated. In other words, Christopher Alexander is not the first person to have that idea. And it was first observed by Roger and Baker. Roger, he's got lots of names. Roger Baker, Garlic Baker.
- [27:40]
A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
And Hubert Wright in an ethnography called the Midwest and Its Children. Can you tell us a little bit about that work? Because I think what it's going to do is it's going to give us examples of affordances that children take advantage of.
- [27:54]
A
Okay, this is really interesting. There are a bunch of academics between the 1950s and the 1980s that all independently developed theories of ecological perception. And they all seem to call it theories of ecological this or that. They understood that what they were experiencing was ecology. But as far as anyone can gather, none of them knew about each other's work. The first of them was Garlic and Wright in this ethnography. And they basically went to some small town in the Midwest and watched how children play. And they spent years watching how children play. And what they discovered is that the way people play, the way that children play, is they play according to the environment that they find themselves in. So you put them in a sports field and they will play sports. You put them in a different environment in the forest, and they'll build a cubbyhouse. Right. The things that they're choosing to do are structured by the environments in which they're doing it. You bring them to a place where they can swim and they'll swim. Right. I mean, it sounds incredibly obvious to anybody. Of course they do, because that's how we all operate. But it doesn't sound obvious when you realize that these environments, they're lessening our ability to. To make choices. We can still be creative. We can still go, okay, I don't care if I'm in a library. I want to sing. And you might sing in a library. Right. But the environment says, don't do this. And the environment's dumb. You know, it doesn't really say it. It's just part of us. Each behavior setting has inhibitory forces all around it. And it has affordances in the middle. The things that you can do, the things that you're invited to do, and the things that you're told not to do.
- [30:01]
B
And some of those things are physical, so they're structural, morphological is what I think Alexander would call it. But some of them are also social. Right. Some of them are just the expectations of a library.
- [30:14]
A
Yeah. Now you're straying into another one of those academics who discovered ecological perception. This is suddenly the work of a guy called Yuri Bronhofer. And he was all about how the environment is structured by our cultures, by our societies, by the rules that our societies make and so forth. Once you put all these guys together, and I believe that they were all guys, you start seeing that the ecological theory of perception, actually, I mean, it's hardly a surprise that people discovered it independently because it's there to be discovered. And it's quite evident the moment you.
- [30:53]
B
Look at really is. Yeah, it really is. It's funny, I grew up in as well, I didn't totally grow up there, but until I was six, I lived in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and all we really had was mud. But let me tell you, mud fights. Epic mud fights. It turns out Oak Ridge, Tennessee is famous for mud. When you read history books about Oak Ridge, Tennessee, it's about people getting stuck in mud. That's what we had. Right. So absolutely, you. Anything can be a toy.
- [31:23]
A
And that's the affordance that people remember Oak Ridge for.
- [31:27]
B
Right.
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A
My guess is that there wasn't much to do then. Play in the mud.
- [31:32]
B
No. We had trees. You could climb trees. Yeah. Climb trees. You could get in mud fights.
- [31:37]
A
Yeah. So you get into the mud and you could get out of it.
- [31:41]
B
That's very true. Well, the phrase that I particularly liked, by the way, that book is hard to get. The Midwest and its Children. The Psychological Ecology of an American Town. It's not in print and it's really expensive used, but I got a few quotes out of it. Behavior settings as a concept, behavior settings.
- [32:01]
A
Are these structured places that are structured by expectations and design, even if that design is natural, where there are certain behaviors that are associated with that place. That's the behavior setting and that's what I refer to as the inhibitory environment. Whereas the affordances in the middle of the behavior setting are the excitatory environment. They get us going, they make us focus, they tell us what to do. But the environment that isn't intrinsic in those affordances are inhibitory. They're trying to stop us or we use them to Stop us from drifting off and doing other things. What's the behavior setting in an open plan office? It's completely different from behavior setting to an enclosed office.
- [32:55]
B
Yeah, I agree. Two people came on the show who run something called the College of Extraordinary Experiences. Every year they rent a castle and they invite 150 people to come there and have extraordinary experiences. I know, I know. And it's actually, it's college for experienced designers. And then they invite all sorts of very divergent people. But one of the things they said is that the setting gives people an alibi to behave in ways that they would not in any other setting. And that they recognize that what they're doing is providing alibis. And some people are ready to take those alibis and go with it, and some people are not ready to do it. And that's fine. But a part of what they were describing in different languages, that there are these inhibitory things that are around us every day, they're going to create an environment in which some of those are.
- [33:49]
A
Loosened, at least that they've been really shifted.
- [33:53]
B
Yes.
- [33:54]
A
You know, we shouldn't be surprised how much we shift. You just look at your own behavior. When you walk into the foyer of a really nice hotel, you suddenly feel kind of a bit nice, a bit polite. You know, you walk differently, you behave differently, you treat other people differently. And then you go and walk into the playground of high school and the behavior is like completely different. Right. Why? It's these behavior settings so we can change and we can manipulate those behavior settings. And I do very deliberately design behavior settings in order to give people choice of behavior settings. When I designed a recent dementia care facility, I designed it with several very distinct behavior setting types to create different feelings for different people who are having different moods. And some people will prefer the place with the chandeliers and the high ceilings, and other people are going to prefer sitting around their own little cozy kitchen.
- [35:02]
B
How large an effect? I mean, I know that as people look at salutogenesis, that they've done some measures of the effect that architecture can have on our physical and mental health. And is it measurable?
- [35:15]
A
There haven't been a great deal, but there have been some, and there have been done using natural experiments. And they don't really measure slutogenesis, they measure the things that salutogenesis rely on. So they go, oh, you know, access to outdoors, access to direct sunlight, et cetera. So they are things that people reckon are pretty solutogenic, at least for the people that are using those facilities. And then they're measuring the difference, but it's a difficult thing to measure. It's just not impossible.
- [35:57]
B
One of the studies that I read about in your work is that 30% faster recovery and 38% lower mortality were found when patients recovering in hospital were given sunlit rooms for psychiatric disorders.
- [36:15]
A
That's significant, but bear in mind those studies were done in the US in one of the northern states. You can imagine in winter if you've got a south facing room and you've got sunlight pouring in, it doesn't take a genius to see that it's going to make a massive difference. The fact that it does shouldn't surprise us. Rather than having the same room facing north.
- [36:50]
B
Hi everyone. Here are some gift ideas inspired by guests on Work for Humans. For the people in your life who like a challenge, try the exquisite puzzles of Stumpcraft's Jason Robillard, who told us all about the essentials of great puzzle design. For something seasonal, you might like Mistletoe Market, but my favorite is called Queen Bee. If someone you know is taking work way too seriously, help them to lighten up with Greebroff's shiny new book. Today was fun. If you have a friend who's at sea in the pace of change, I recommend Embracing Uncertainty. It's the latest book from Margaret Heffernan, in which she tells us the techniques that writers, musicians and artists use to thrive in an unpredictable world, and the one that I'm definitely going to put in my own stocking this year. Joe Pine's new book, the Transformation Economy, is now available for pre order. Yes, except I'm surprised. And the reason I'm surprised is I don't expect a little bit more misery to be deadly. I expect it to be survivable. And this has to do with the resources that we were talking about earlier. So if there's a population who is very low on generalized resistance resources, then that might definitely be enough.
- [38:20]
A
There's a theorist in salutogenesis called Bent Lindstrong and he uses analogy of a river that comes to a waterfall and people are swimming in the river. But if they get too close to the waterfall, they get caught in the current and they go over. Once they're over, they're dead. That's death. You can't return from that. And the last ditch effort to stop people from going down that waterfall is what we call white coat medicine or similar interventions like, yep, rip them out of the water. It's often really uncomfortable. It's often last ditch effort and it's very, very focused on very Specific things. By the time you've got somebody in acute psychiatric care, they're very near the edge of that waterfall. It never used to be the case. In the 1950s, about 1% of the US population was locked up for psychiatric conditions at any given time. It's a huge percentage, but that's because they are locked up for chronic conditions, for ongoing conditions, and possibly for all kinds of things like just being slightly different from everybody else on the spectrum, so to speak. Whatever it is, as psychiatric hospitals have become more focused on really acute care, it's picking up people later on in that process as they're really in the flow of the waterfall. So any change, anything that reverses the direction of the water at that point is going to make a massive difference.
- [39:57]
B
I was just reading an article this week on suicide prevention and how just eliminating opportunities to kill yourself gives people an opportunity to get through it, to get through that moment.
- [40:11]
A
Yeah. So this is something that I've done quite a lot of work on, and there's a couple of things here. You can eliminate opportunities for people to kill themselves by creating door latches that can't possibly hang you, by creating windows that you can't possibly open, and by cutting down all the trees in the garden. Right. And it takes away all our opportunities for people to kill themselves. Fair enough. But it speaks constantly of killing yourself. Why do I have this kind of hook in my bedroom, one that I can't even hang a coat on? Why are they giving me these weird locks that don't even work properly? It's because they don't want me to hang myself. Why have they cut down all the trees in the garden? It's because they don't want me to hang themselves. So what they're doing is the extreme of taking away those opportunities can speak to those opportunities. And then there's an incredible number of people that kill themselves within 48 hours of being unadmitted from a psychiatric facility. And it's probably because of that. I believe it's because of that. The other alternative is give people other things to think about. Yeah. Take away the opportunities that are directly there that are really dangerous, obviously. But whenever you take away an opportunity, you need to put another one, a better one in place. Two better ones. Give them a choice, and then they're not focusing on that killing themselves.
- [41:49]
B
What does it mean to say that architecture provides a narrative context?
- [41:54]
A
This is another very core area of my work. When we're designing the environment, we are designing stage sets, where every architectural environment is a stage set. That's the way I like to see it. And I look at the environment even before it's been created, because that's what we do. We imagine them before we build them, before we design them, or as we design them. I go, what does this stage set say? Is this play a play where the protagonist is going to have a great time, where there is celebration and joy to be found? Or is there a tragedy waiting to happen here? What does the environment say? Because we're extremely good at reading narratives. We don't just read narratives from words. We read them from our environments, too. We read them from the way that people treat us, the way that people treat other people. And the reason why we're so sensitized to narratives is, is because our brains are designed to interpret everything in the narrative structure. Even if there is no intrinsic narrative structure to be found, the brain will create that opportunity, and they will see the narrative structure. So Chekhov said, you know, if there's a gun hanging on the wall in the first scene, by the end of the play, someone's used it. He's talking about stage stats, but he's also talking about affordances.
- [43:18]
B
It's very interesting because those are the stories that we find ourselves in.
- [43:23]
A
We're always in the story, right?
- [43:26]
B
And I notice things. The third episode of this podcast, actually fourth, was Alder Yarrow, and one of the things he spoke about is how our experience is actually not a static thing that we interact with, but that it's loops that we test the environment and we see what comes back to us from the environment. And so there's this constant testing of our environment to find out what the nature of the environment is. And so going to a door and finding it locked, okay, that's a test of the environment. The environment just told me that I do not have this choice. And when I was growing up, I lived next to the University of California, San Diego. There were no locks, hardly any. And it was just a completely open campus. I could go into the library. You didn't have to badge in. There was no sense of security. It was just an open. The weight room was open, the pool was open. Everything was open. And so the narrative there was. It was a narrative of plenty. It wasn't a narrative of fear. And so even just looking at how locked doors and security passes the narrative that they tell, I can very much see as a very compelling idea to me.
- [44:42]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Those things can really invade the built environment. On the other hand, they can also be really useful. So when you're designing A residential facility. I design a lot of them. So I'll come back to it. It's really nice to have a little RFID chip on the person, the resident, so that when they get to their own door, their door's always unlocked. When they get to a door where they are able to pass through, it's always unlocked. But when they get to a door, someone else's bedroom, it's locked. One of the things with the attentional system, the human detentional system, is that we're always engaged in testing in attention. Playing with this pen, not because I want to draw anything, but because it's here. I'm fiddling around with it, I'm drawing squiggles here. It's not because I need squiggles to be drawn. It's because my surplus attention is being focused in that particular way. And it's something deeply to do with our neuroscience. And when I finish writing my book, you'll find out why. But that active attention is what keeps us constantly looking for opportunities and engaged in our environment. And if people don't have that kind of active attention, it's a real kicker sign that something's wrong if people aren't actively testing and engaging with the environment. And so it's a good idea to have environments which you want to test where there are things to do. They don't even have to be particularly special. They just need to be doable.
- [46:23]
B
A theme that you keep coming back to is that there are no simple fixed rules that we can apply in every context that's highly contextual, and that something that works in one environment and may be perfect in that environment may not work in another environment. And also that there might be competing needs in an environment, both of which need to be satisfied. So we need the nurses in a facility and the doctors in a facility to feel secure. And we need the residents in a facility to feel that they have choice and that they've got interesting things. So there's all these balances that are going on together.
- [47:04]
A
They need to feel secure too.
- [47:05]
B
And need to feel secure. Absolutely, absolutely need to feel secure. And so I want to ask, what are the characteristics of an architect who is able to make solutogenic architecture? I ask that because if we're talking to a population today who we want to create solutogenic work that may have a set of abilities to do that, that are mysterious.
- [47:34]
A
Yeah. So in terms of architects that can do solutogenic work, for a start, they need to know that it's possible. They need to know a. That it's possible, and B, they need to know, have some ideas about how to do it. But probably more importantly than anything else, they need to care to do it. And there are a lot of architects out there, and I can even name some, though I won't, who don't care. They just want to do as their client tells them to do. They want to deliver the generic solution as quickly as possible in exactly the way that their client is expecting it. Send out the bills, receive the money, go on to the next project. That kind of an attitude toward your work as an architect isn't conducive to salutogenic work, unless, of course, your client demands it and gives you the time and the space to do it and the resources to do it. But even then, you can read a lot about solutogenics and not quite get it. Whereas it's something like any other skill, we can find mastery in it. And I don't know many masters in.
- [48:43]
B
Salutogenic architecture, but a part of the way that you move through the world, for instance, is intuitive, it's empathetic, it's aesthetic. It feels to me like an artistic sensibility.
- [48:57]
A
Have you seen the room that I'm in? Have you seen my own?
- [49:00]
B
Also.
- [49:02]
A
I'm not sure if this is a video cast or a podcast, but, yeah, I'm intensely, intensely artistic. I rarely go a day of my life without some sort of artistic endeavor because I get to bedtime and go, I haven't drawn, I haven't sculpted. What happened today? Did I really spend the whole day doing tax returns? I get very frustrated if I don't get those opportunities. It's one of the affordances that I seek actively every day. So you're right.
- [49:35]
B
And one of the things that you wrote about that I really liked, that I really get, is that you don't want to create a house where all the counters are white because they can never be made clean.
- [49:48]
A
Hard white surfaces are just a disaster. Architects love them because they look so slick. But, you know, one pubic hair on the floor and the place looks filthy.
- [49:59]
B
Yeah, right. So something that is tolerant of life, that is tolerant of mess.
- [50:06]
A
It's something that I really believe in homes that are livable. You want to have a place which isn't just tolerant of mess, but it enables people to get through without being so easily distracted. Because when the environment really is very demanding on you, demands perfect cleanliness the whole time, demands perfect quiet the whole time, when the behavior setting makes demands of you that are absolutely unmeatable as an ordinary mortal Human, your life is a slave to the environment. And I think that a lot of architects kind of like that. They want people to be enslaved to their architecture. There's a kind of ego boost in that. Whereas I don't. When I want to go to a room and roll out a yoga mat and do yoga, I do not want to notice that there's dust in the corner because then I'll find myself not doing an up dog. I'll find myself dusting the corner. But if I can't see it, it's not going to happen.
- [51:10]
B
That's an affordance to clean.
- [51:12]
A
That's an affordance to clean up. Right. Sometimes so much easier than the affordance of a difficult yoga pose.
- [51:20]
B
You can sort of tell I'm very influenced by Christopher Alexander, whose work I really admire. He has a book, the Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth.
- [51:29]
A
Well, that's one of the books I haven't read of his, but somebody's offered to give it to me. They just keep on forgetting to drop it by.
- [51:36]
B
I'm going to summarize a piece of it. The subtitle is A Struggle between Two World Systems and the two world systems, one of them is about money. And he feels that architecture is very, very driven by cost and that that is one world system and another world system is one that is driven by human values. His sense is that the money driven world has dominated architecture for a long time and that it makes unlivable spaces. And I'm wondering if you would agree with that. You've mentioned different kinds of architects. Are they dominant from different world systems?
- [52:16]
A
I've never read anything by Christopher Alexander that I disagree with. He's deeply intuitive. His works are deeply considered thought bubbles that he's put his whole career into. He has a great understanding of humans in their physical environment, and not just humans in their physical environment, but humanity in its urban environment as well. He's a deeply thoughtful guy and the people that he works with as well, or worked with as well. So yeah, and look, we do struggle as architects with our money. But it's a funny thing because there is a whole genre of architecture, if you like, which is all about spending more money. Oh, okay. There's golden toilets, for example, right? And golden elevators and really expensive Swarovski chandelier. Right. You can spend ridiculous amounts of money getting no essential extra value unless it's the affordance of other people looking at you and going, that person's really, really rich. And that has to be really important for you. So there Is that genre of architecture. I haven't had a lot to do with it, to be honest. For me, most of my clients have been relatively modest in their requirements and usually have tight budgets. And I kind of prefer to work with a client that has a tight budget.
- [54:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, I can see that.
- [54:06]
A
There's an era that's changed. I think about my mentor. When I was a young man, about 14 years old, I adopted a friend of the family who's a very famous Australian architect. He's dead now. He died last year. He was one of Australia's great grandfathers of architecture, and he was so generous with me. He used to let me come and stay with him on the weekends and I'd bring a roll of drawings under my arm and he would look through my drawings with me and guide me through my own drawings and say, well, why did you design this like this? Can you see that this window faces the wrong way? I go, why does it face? I want the sunlight to come through. He goes, the sun isn't coming from that direction. Really, like, beautiful insight. He was the one who taught me how to do sections. I was only doing plans at first. He said, oh, what about a section? I didn't know what a section was, and about elevations. And one of his friends who also used to join him, Adrian Snodgrass, he pointed out to me that the plan is where people chart the myth, the storyline which they wish to propose, but it's in elevation that they draw their ambitions. That's where the desires come. That's where the aspirations come. And so I was thinking about him because in his era, he used to have clients that just had endless amounts of money, and they'd hire him, say, build me a house. And he would build them a house, which was totally experimental, and they'd love it, and they would spend, however amount of money, the equivalent of millions today, to build it, without apparently questioning his design decisions. And he managed to build this portfolio of just incredibly beautiful, thoughtful, considered work on these sort of limitless budgets of his clients, just because that was what was afforded to him. And I've never been in that situation, but I think that I've managed to develop it some sort of mastery on another level which still honors his memory.
- [56:33]
B
A huge budget, it doesn't seem to me is necessary at all. I mean, I'm sure it's handy, but it can also maybe make you go overboard. I mean, some constraints.
- [56:43]
A
Well, I mean, his thing was all about not going overboard with a huge budget.
- [56:47]
B
That's the trick.
- [56:49]
A
Finding what's perfect for that site, for that person. Creating a really nice expression for that person. He wasn't a gold toilet seat guy, though I'm sure he could have afforded his clients. Could have afforded it.
- [57:04]
B
There was, you may know it, actually, the poetic movement, the Olipo. They were a group who realized that what makes great poetry is actually the constraints. And so they thought sonnets are great because sonnets are hard. It's a hard form.
- [57:19]
A
Okay.
- [57:20]
B
Yeah. And so they started inventing new hard forms. And there was one French writer who wrote a novel in French without the letter E just to create a constraint. And in fact, this is a novel in which all of the characters are sitting around saying, don't you think something's missing? Something's not right here. Something is missing.
- [57:42]
A
They're not saying something because there's an E in it.
- [57:45]
B
Well, in French, I don't know how you would say it. And of course, I've never read it because it doesn't translate very well. But constraints can be a beautiful creative source.
- [57:55]
A
Oh, very important. They're really, really important. So one of the things that I do is I mentor young architects and artists and I really do get them to constrain their ideas and say, it's a really nice idea. Save it for your next project because you don't want to put all of your ideas in one project. Keep them clean, keep them beautiful.
- [58:18]
B
That's very good advice. So what do you hire your job to do for you?
- [58:24]
A
I found that question quite challenging. You sent it to me earlier and I found it quite challenging. And at first I wanted to give you a really pithy answer, but it doesn't fit because my job does a lot of things and I do it for a lot of reasons. You know, on some level, I do it because I can. I've run into this area of science and architecture, this crossover area of science and architecture, which is quite extraordinary. I've discovered a hell of a lot and I need to share it, I need to use it. Not because it does something to me so much as I can give so much to the world. So it doesn't really answer your brief properly, because what does it give me that I bother? I don't know. It's kind of like a magician has to work their magic. I don't know. I feel like Paul. How is it Paul Riveri, Riviera Riveri, the one who discovered that there was a war of independence about to start in America. He got on his horse and he went yelling, saying, the war has started. And Everyone listened. And really, as far as I can gather, the only reason why he did it was it was so much fun being the guy on the horse making that announcement. And I guess that I'm enjoying the ride.
- [59:55]
B
Ah, yeah. There's so many layers in what you said. I mean, one of them is the basic idea which is making the world better. But there's a deeper idea which is bringing your unique value to the world, which is that you have something that you can give to the world that very few people, maybe nobody else can give. And that that is an opportunity that is irresistible.
- [60:18]
A
It truly is. If you suddenly discover that you are. Was it Rapunzel who can weave their straw into gold? You weave your straw into gold. Right. It's something that you uniquely can do. So I'm not sure if it was Rapunzel or she was the one who dropped her hair. I can't remember. I'm not very good at that sort of thing. But if you can do it, especially if you can uniquely do it, you do it.
- [60:46]
B
What does your work cost you?
- [60:48]
A
I sometimes have worried that it costs me the opportunity to do those kind of expressive, really beautiful architectural works, like my mentor was so able to do. But in truth, I suspect that those opportunities don't exist much anymore anyway. And so it probably doesn't cost me anything. I have to take a backseat when I'm designing. I have to let my clients be more important than me. And for any kind of artist, but particularly somebody like an architect, that can be a little tough if I let myself be self indulgent about it. But I'm very good at not being self indulgent about it.
- [61:39]
B
I have to say. I can certainly see that there are architects out there who make it about them.
- [61:45]
A
Yes, unfortunately.
- [61:47]
B
Yeah. And that should be a cost. In other words, there should be a cost to that.
- [61:53]
A
Well, perhaps there is. Perhaps there is. You know, perhaps, you know, doing that kind of soulless architecture leaves you with a bit of a soulless life. But I mean, maybe I'm just being moralistic here.
- [62:04]
B
Maybe, you know, maybe they're great. They're just finding.
- [62:07]
A
These people are just totally soulful and they're totally able to find meaning in other ways. And great. And good on them.
- [62:15]
B
Well, I was just reading. You need to help me say this name right? Courvoisier.
- [62:19]
A
Corbusier.
- [62:20]
B
Corbusier. I was just reading Corbusier and I was reading his book on architecture, and honest to God, the introduction is like a manual on how not to do things because he's the center of the world, the architectural world that he's creating. And he's the sole source of creativity in the world that he's describing.
- [62:44]
A
And people bought it. People just accepted him. They gave him that role and they just accepted that he had it. It was a quite extraordinary period, you know, and it was so unhuman centered. It was Corbusier centered. Yeah. Do you know that his model of a human was not just a white male, but a fictional white male? He based his human module on Dick Tracy, a fictional character.
- [63:12]
B
Really?
- [63:13]
A
Yeah. Six foot tall, male. White male. Right. Muscular, handsome, whatever. And that he apparently used to think of Dick Tracy when he was designing his building. He wasn't thinking of you, Dart, and he certainly wasn't thinking of me. And we're white males. But have you seen the kitchens that he was imagining for Dick Tracy's wife or girlfriend? He certainly wasn't imagining men in the kitchen, except for the high shelves, of.
- [63:43]
B
Course, for people listening. Corbusier, he created these incredibly cold, incredibly distant, theoretical structures that looked beautiful as a drawing, as an idea, but were.
- [63:57]
A
Horrible to live in for most of us. But some people love them. There's one or two unit de habitations that he designed that are just like much loved buildings, but they're all lived in by people who love the building. You know, they're not forced to live there. So they love it because it's Corbusier. So there is a bit of a feedback loop there. One thing that's really interesting about Corbusier is that he was obviously a French speaker and he started designing those unites. He started designing them with off form concrete. And the off form, he decided to use untreated timber, which he called baton bru b r u T so that the concrete got this sort of texture from the wood that he was using as a form. And then there was an English architect called James Stirling. And he, among all the other young architects from around the world, just used to watch what Corbusier was doing. But apparently James Sterling didn't speak great French. And so when he heard about Corbusier's brutalism, as Cabusier was calling it, he went, okay, the fashion is to design brutal. And he started designing off form concrete and these brutal buildings. And that became brutalism.
- [65:21]
B
No, I had no idea.
- [65:23]
A
And so we've got this period of these obnoxious buildings, some of which have heritage classifications now. And it comes from a misinterpretation of Khabosiya's language.
- [65:36]
B
It was A very poor translation. That's hilarious. Oh, that's great.
- [65:40]
A
But it worked for Sterling. It worked for the clients who wanted those buildings, be they libraries and, you know, civic buildings, government buildings and stuff.
- [65:50]
B
I'm just going to read one sentence from this. This is the third paragraph. The architect, by his arrangement of forms, realizes an order which is a pure creation of his spirit. So it's very centralized on the architect and the architect's genius.
- [66:07]
A
You can see why I find his work a little bit objectionable.
- [66:11]
B
It has been fabulous talking. Thank you very much for coming on the show. Where can people learn more about you? Where can they learn more about your work?
- [66:19]
A
I'm about to release a brand new website. My website's kind of up, but it's been changed a bit at the moment and it is www.psychological.design and that's probably a great place to start.
- [66:36]
B
Fantastic. Www.psychological.design Otherwise, if you can spell my.
- [66:43]
A
Name, you can tap it into the Internet and you'll find hundreds of articles and quite a lot about me. And you'll find some stuff that you're not expecting because I've done a lot of things other than just architecture and salutogenics and so forth. I've even got an autobiography which you can download on Spotify.
- [67:01]
B
Did you really grow up in Papua New Guinea?
- [67:04]
A
Yes, that's hardly even mentioned in my autobiography now. My book called Magic is about two years of my life when I took off around the world trying to find the truth about magic, partially because I had grown up in Papua New guinea and I didn't quite believe the Western paradigm which said that. No, all that stuff that your friends in Papua New guinea believed in, that's magic and that's not real. Because I went, yeah, but I kind of believe that too. So I'm going to figure it out myself.
- [67:34]
B
Oh, that's going to have to be another episode of Work for Humans. That's really interesting. Thank you.
- [67:40]
A
Thanks very much, Todd.
- [67:43]
B
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.