Population-Based Design: A Wellness Approach for Designing Healthcare Environments

Modern healthcare environments are typically designed with an illness perspective, focusing on spaces that function to support diagnosis and treatment of an aliment rather than a wellness perspective, which identifies environmental factors maximizing wellness for that aliment. Patient-Population Based Design is a framework for understanding the patient’s explicit needs related to his or her illness, and in the process, uncovering the hidden potential needs that would improve that particular population’s wellbeing. This process begins with a broad understanding of the patient population’s clinical diagnosis and clinical presentation, followed by the environmental goals and environmental features that are therapeutic for that illness.

This paper proposes that the designer must understand more than what supports wellness; the designer must first understand the disease and then translate what wellness would look like for the individual with that particular illness. The objective of Patient-Population Based Design is to create a universal process for designing healthcare settings; having a universal process will increase the likelihood that healthcare environments will be designed to foster health rather than emphasize illness.