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...and the demands of modern working life can often leave us
feeling stressed and depleted. So what can we do...
The natural world is full of curves, colour and complexity.
And bringing all this into the workplace can have a big impact
on our behaviour and our mood.
There are plenty of psychological studies that reveal changes in the
body and brain when people view certain colours.
These changes can influence our productivity, our creativity,
stress levels and much more.
A recent report by Human Spaces
showed that two thirds of people say they feel happier
when they walk into bright office environments
with yellow, blue and green colours.
Think about what energy you want to inject into your workspace
and use colour to change the atmosphere.
Biophilia, it's a fancy word with a simple meaning.
It's all about the connection we feel with the natural world
and helps explain why being around plants and trees and natural light
can help us feel a bit better in our daily lives.
Plants can fill and frame a space, making them feel wide and generous.
Studies show that bringing in a plant to work can boost your productivity
by 15%.
Maggie's centres were set up to give people who were going through cancer,
whether or not it was a person with cancer themselves
or their family and friends, a place to come to get help
with the challenges that cancer brings to their lives,
psychological, emotional and practical help.
From the beginning at Maggie's, we always knew the importance of views,
connections to nature, to be able to allow the distraction that being able
to see life and energy outside a building was really very important.
And we also knew that from the experience that people have
within hospital, where often they're under strip lights,
there's no distraction.
Biophilia isn't a term that I think people who come into the centre
would talk about and perhaps know, but what we do know is
when they come in the door, they're immediately--
There's a feeling that they talk about
that this is a place that they feel that they want to be in,
that they feel safe.
And that feeling is in response to the fact that they can see
different views into different windows of nature,
there's trees moving, there's grapes growing,
there's a pot outside where people can go
and pick mint to make their own tea.
So it offers an element of control within their environment,
a sense of peacefulness, and every time they come in, they talk about
it being slightly different, so there's a sort of distraction
and an energy that comes from something that's not static.
Researchers looked at two large commercial offices,
in the UK and the Netherlands.
They found that plants significantly increased workplace satisfaction
and self-reported levels of focus.
So why not nip down to the garden centre and add some
greenery to your desk?
Encouraging innovation isn't easy, and when it comes to buildings
it means doing things very differently.
Here at the Francis Crick Institute in London, they've mixed up teams
from different disciplines, right throughout the building.
The idea is that by bringing together people
with different specialities, amazing things can happen.
And this is not the only building that's recognised the value
of mixing up employees and organisations
with different disciplines.
Building 20 in MIT was known as the magical incubator.
Built near Boston in 1942,
it housed a whole load of different laboratories,
research groups and academic fields.
And out of that collision came some of the most ground-breaking
developments in science and technology.
Like the atomic clock, video games and Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar.
So if you're struggling to get through the working day,
it might be worth redesigning your office with wellbeing in mind.
Because a happy and harmonious workspace
isn't something that just happens by accident.