"Modern luxury is the ability to think clearly, sleep deeply, move slowly, and live quietly in a world designed to prevent all four." -Justin Welsh

Here's a question for you: Would you rather have the car of your dreams or would you rather live longer? (Maybe you don't care at all about cars and so this is an easy question, but bear with me, I'm sure you get the point.) This is a question that was posed to the audience at Elevate earlier this week and the entire room responded by saying that they would choose the latter. This is perhaps obvious. What good are material possessions if you don't have your health? But it's still an important frame of reference. And it's why Brazil-based developer AG7, who was at the conference, has centered their entire practice around "building wellness." Forget the fancy brands. Their buildings are focused on one thing: to help you live better and longer. This, to me, is a compelling value proposition. Because I think there's an easy argument to be made that there's no greater luxury than our own health and wellness.

Cover photo by Alex Perri on Unsplash

Toto announced a new product this month at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) called the Wellness Toilet. It won't be available to consumers for at least several years, but the plan is for it to do two key things to improve overall health and wellness. It will scan your body when you sit on it and it will analyze your poop. (Not urine?) It will then make recommendations via your smartphone about how you might start to make better life decisions. Presumably this will include being more active and eating better. This, to me, feels like an obvious way to innovate around the toilet. If it were available today and it actually worked, I would likely be an early adopter. Either way, I look forward to hopefully including this in future development projects.

Here's more about the product from Toto's press release:

The WELLNESS TOILET uses multiple cutting-edge sensing technologies to support consumers' wellness by tracking and analyzing their mental and physical status. Each time the individual sits on the WELLNESS TOILET, it scans their body and its key outputs, then provides recommendations to improve their wellness. There is no additional action needed, so people can easily check their wellness throughout their daily routine, every time they take a bathroom break. They will see their current wellness status and receive wellness-improvement recommendations on a dashboard in an app on their smartphones.

The residential bathroom is the perfect place to support people's wellness for a variety of reasons. First, although there are a number of other products that track individuals' wellness (e.g., wearable devices), it is more convenient to monitor and analyze the body as a part of the everyday routine act of using the WELLNESS TOILET, to which individuals are accustomed. Second, toilets and people have two unique touchpoints that cannot be found elsewhere – the skin and human waste. The WELLNESS TOILET is in direct contact with individuals' skin when they are sitting on it, and it analyzes the waste they deposit -- a wealth of wellness data can be collected from fecal matter.

Image: Toto

I haven’t spent a lot of time in hospitals. So I may not be the best judge of what I’m about to say. But why do we design hospitals to be so depressing? Why do they have to look so, well, clinical?

I asked this question on Twitter a few days ago and I was recommended to listen to a 99% Invisible podcast called The Blue Yarn. If you haven’t yet heard of this podcast series, I would highly recommend you check it out (in addition The Blue Yarn episode).

What this particular podcast was about was rethinking hospital design in terms of patients, as opposed to staff hierarchy. And the way they illustrated the need for that was through some simple blue yarn.

Using yarn, management physically mapped out the paths of patients as they moved through this particular medical center. And what they found was a tremendous amount of waste. There was a lot of waiting around (in dingy rooms) and a lot of unnecessary moving around.

Instead of putting patients first, the hospital had been designed in terms of staff offices and other criteria. Ultimately, this exercise ended up triggering a complete redesign of the hospital.

After the redesign, there were a lot of grouchy doctors who had lost cushy offices. Some even quit. But the hospital became more efficient, more profitable, and, most importantly, safer for patients. So much so that their insurance expenses dropped by 37%!

But this obviously isn’t the only foray into rethinking hospital design. In fact, there’s something out there called “evidence-based hospital design”, where the objective is to leverage data and actual evidence to figure out the relationship between architecture and patient well-being.

One of the pioneering studies in this area was done in 1984 by Roger Ulrich. 

The study took patients in Pennsylvania recovering from gallbladder surgery and split them up into two groups. The first group was given a room with a beautiful nature view and the second group was given a room with a view of a brick wall.

What they discovered from this experiment was that the group with the view of nature not only recovered faster but also needed fewer painkillers during the recovery. That’s a fascinating finding.

So it’s not surprising that this sort of thinking is making its way into contemporary hospital design. And that’s a great thing.

Hospitals should be uplifting, restorative, and beautiful spaces. Does that not seem sensible?