Evidence is Found in Many Domains

Abstract

This journal is dedicated to the concept of design based on the use of credible evidence from research. The very term evidence-based design and its fashionable currency suggest that architects and design professionals only recently may have come to use evidence in their work. Nothing could be further from the truth. Architects have certainly always applied evidence from structural and civil engineering, mathematics, geometry, physics, material science, fluid dynamics, real estate economics, and so forth. It seems to me that the current emphasis on designing with evidence is a recognition that architects are now being asked to turn to unfamiliar domains of knowledge, domains for which customarily they have no educational foundation.This issue features a much-anticipated paper that updates the important 2004 work of Roger Ulrich and his colleagues in which a meta-analysis of the research literature documented more than 600 citations linking environmental design and clinical outcomes. Ulrich and Xiaobo Quan of Texas A&M University collaborated four years ago with Craig Zimring and Anjali Joseph of the Georgia Institute of Technology to compile this important paper. It has been widely circulated and downloaded from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Center for Health Design websites many thousands of times. It seems that nearly everyone interested in evidence-based design for healthcare has encountered the original groundbreaking paper. Some irreverently have described it as the Bible for evidencebased practitioners.The editors of HERD are delighted to publish the sequel to this 2004 work by Ulrich et al. Readers will find the unusual length of the piece in this issue to be well worth the time invested in its reading. The paper was again supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation through Georgia Tech. This time Ulrich, Zimring, and their new collaborators have documented more than 1,000 papers relevant to the relationship of design to outcomes, including topics such as patient safety and stress reduction for patients and staff.The study follows the basic premises of Ulrich's theory of supportive design (1997) in which he offered a summation of what was known in the literature at the time and made recommendations to designers. These suggestions addressed the concepts of stress reduction, sense of control, social support, positive distraction, and the role of nature. Many healthcare architects and designers have been influenced by this theory and actively follow the recommended model. The theory of supportive design is now well established in the mainstream canon of healthcare design best practice. …

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