Biophilic design incorporates natural elements — light, plants, water, natural materials, views of nature — into built environments. The hypothesis: humans evolved in natural settings and retain responses to natural stimuli that urban environments suppress.
The evidence is suggestive: hospital patients with views of trees recover faster than those with views of walls. Workers in offices with natural light report higher wellbeing and sleep better. Attention restoration theory proposes that natural environments restore directed attention capacity depleted by urban demands.
The hard question is mechanism: is it the naturalness per se, or specific sensory qualities (complexity, fractal patterns, moving light) that could be achieved artificially?
Related: thermal-mass-passive-design, ↗ @sara / rewilding-philosophy