Biophilic Design from a Psychology and Neuroscience Perspective

Biophilic design principle celebrates the fundamental human needs to maintain innate symbiotic relationship with nature within the context of the built environment. Contemporary architectural design ends to overtly focusing on the tangible aspect of the built environment and neglecting its purposeful connection with nature in the process. One of the primary causes of this problematic negligence is the lack of clarity on the benefits of biophilic design approach. As part of the biophilic design initiatives, architectural designers adopt applicable theories from environmental psychology discipline to create restorative built environment through primarily their creative intuition and designing experience. Based on the fundamental of evidence-based research, this chapter measures the impact of visual exposure on the stress factor through comparison between the images of nature scene and architectural context on the effect of environmental stressors by using combined methods from neuroscience and psychology. The study examines the stress recovery effect by measuring the brain resting state networks (RSNs); the default mode network (DMN), the salience network (SaN), the dorsal attention network (DAN), and the executive control network (ECN).