INTRODUCTION The last decade has seen a growing interest in all aspects of health and wellbeing and designers have not been immune to this. Much of the debate has been framed in terms of providing spaces to support wellness, mindfulness as well as more established forms of medicine and healing, both through individual optimisation and self-care as well as by increasing accessibility for underrepresented groups within society. Sustainability and the use of healthy materials was another ongoing concern. At the time of writing, the Covid-19 pandemic may still dominate the conversation, but it hasn’t replaced earlier debates around wellbeing. Instead, the pandemic has acted as a catalyst for existing trends, as opposed to a new, allencompassing reset as to what the healthy indoors might look like. This doesn’t necessarily mean that natural ventilation, easily disinfectable surfaces, home office nooks, occasional maskwearing or individual activity pods will soon be a thing of the past. What we do see is an attempt to expand access and make these spaces more inclusive and more a part of their communities, often retrofitting existing spaces for new uses. While existing typologies may change as a result of the trend towards the sharing and experiential economies, new spatial concepts and hybrids emerge, emphasising and clustering health and wellbeing functions in places where this may not have been the case in the past. The Healthy Indoors
4
