Healthy Homes, Designing with light and air for sustainability and wellbeing, authors Nick Baker and Koen Steemers

Review by Gary Young:

A much needed appraisal of the current state of design for wellbeing, this book covers the broad range of issues affecting living environments and impacts on psychological and physical health. The writing is accessible, adopting a sustainability audit approach which will be useful for students and designers in urban design and housing.  The authors refer to the available evidence and acknowledge the need for the evidence base to be further developed.

Acknowledging the reality of design for healthy living is complex, considering such a wide range of factors the authors conclude that at best current design solutions should acknowledge concepts of “safe territory” or “good enough design”. The book references scientific data and emphasises with each topic how evidence can be used to create principles for good design solutions, which are, however, often contradictory and require extensive weighing up.  The last section of the book includes design scenarios which illustrate just how varied each design response will need to be, creating almost unique solutions.