Interior Design from an Integrative Health Systems Perspective Reveals the ‘Hidden Dimension’

The places and spaces that we inhabit on a day to day basis elicit powerful emotional responses that influence our health and wellbeing. In response to this notion, the paper describes emerging research that focuses explicitly on the relationship between emotional responses and health and wellbeing. More significantly it does so from a holistic perspective relying on an integrated health systems model. Exploring the implications for interior design, the paper presents a basic understanding about ‘person’ as a whole and how various systems of the human body are interrelated and connected to ‘emotion’ and how the well-being of a person as a whole should be considered in relation to the built environment and its various elements. The paper argues that failure to consider the interrelated and integrative nature of the human body and the dialectic nature of the person-environment relationship severely restricts the potential of interior design to make an enduring positive impact on emotional health and well-being.