Biophilic School Design for Health and Wellbeing

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a wake-up call for education. Research suggests that schools could become better learning environments for health and wellbeing through biophilic design, which became more important during the pandemic and in the post-pandemic environment. Within an educational setting, nature provides a calm and safe context for learning by improving learners’ attention, reducing stress, and increasing curiosity—experiences with nature seem to promote children’s development as persons and as environmental stewards. Existing frameworks for biophilic design support the implementation of including nature in architectural design. However, this focus has been primarily in adult spaces, missing the opportunity for sustainable impact on the wellbeing of younger generations by omitting schools in the crucial context of implementation. Therefore, the design of school classrooms and school grounds needs to be re-imagined to include school users’ health and wellbeing. This ePrint explores the cross-disciplinarity of biophilic school design through the views of the invited authors. It explores a long-term biophilic design approach for post-pandemic schools that promotes the health and wellbeing of their users—children, young people, and adults. Thematic areas include how biophilic design principles can be used to understand the relationship between the natural environment and health and wellbeing; to enhance the health and wellbeing of students and staff; to increase biodiversity; to improve learning outcomes; and to showcase new and emerging evidence of the benefits of the biophilic design in schools.