From bustling transit hubs to pulsing nightclubs, anxiety lurks in the shadows of our public spaces.
There’s situational anxiety in airports or hospitals. Whether you’re waiting for a flu shot or a flight, a bit of tension is probably coloring your experience. Then there’s social anxiety in bars and nightclubs. Where do you wait for friends? Where do you catch your breath away from the dance floor? There’s even sensory anxiety from humming fluorescents and stuffy air in the workplace.
Design, whether physical, digital or virtual, can have a profound impact on our experience of a place. It’s true that creating environments that make people feel genuinely at ease is not always on the brief. But in our collective decades spent crafting experiences that touch all dimensions of human interaction, we’ve found that tackling anxiety as a design challenge yields better public reception, stronger ROI, and spaces people actually want to be in.
Getting there, however, takes more than a CAD license and lofty ideals. Here’s how businesses and organizations across sectors can reduce (if not outright counter) anxiety through their design strategies.
The comfort advantage
Combating anxiety through design isn’t just a trend. It also offers a significant competitive advantage.
In healthcare facilities, the focus is shifting from treating as many patients as possible to creating environments where patients and staff want to spend time. It’s no longer about maxing out a footprint at the cost of human comfort but rather differentiating the space by offering an improved experience.
Such an approach helps defuse people’s stress about entering or being in a space, often before they realize they’re stressed at all.
Journey designer Nicole Ravasini notes, “When staff can do their jobs more easily and experience less stress throughout the day, they stick around longer and perform better. That doesn’t just reduce turnover and recruitment costs. It also contributes to a more attentive, caring, and positive patient experience. And when patients are more comfortable and content, the burden on the staff is lower, and their health outcomes are better.”
Breathers between the beats
Depth-charge bass. Pulsating light. Electrified crowd. A nightclub is exhilarating — until it’s overwhelming. Where do clubgoers catch a breath? How do they step back without stepping out entirely?
Marquee Singapore, a Marina Bay Sands nightclub designed by Journey, articulates some potential answers. The nightclub — which features a three-level layout with a main dance floor, elevated platforms, and a full-size Ferris wheel — helps reconcile anxiety-conscious design with a high-energy environment.
We want people to forget their inhibitions and, to some extent, themselves for a few hours and just have a good time. For Marquee the club experience begins slowly with a long procession that builds anticipation but also gives people time to prepare as they enter. As you walk in, the music gradually gets louder, letting you feel the vibe before fully stepping in. The entrance is on an upper level, so you aren’t immediately thrust into the middle of the party—you can find a perch, get your bearings, and ease in. And there’s the Ferris wheel, so if you want, you can just ride that all night.
As Journey Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer Lionel Ohayon has said, designing with an eye toward intercepting and defusing anxiety is essential for anyone creating built environments. In a nightclub, flow, lighting and entrance points all can color people’s experience. Considering anxiety is simply, as Ohayon notes, good design practice.
Soothing spaces for patients and practitioners
Clubland may seem an unlikely setting to glean insights about healthcare facility design. That said, a hospitality-informed approach to patient care can help reduce the all-too-real anxiety people sense in such places.
Leading providers are transforming sterile, clinical environments into patient-centric refuges with ample windows, private areas, real-time location devices and calming materials. The cold, antiseptic hospital wing is going the way of the iron lung.
Memorial Sloan Kettering’s new 25-floor outpatient care facility is a study in these new design practices. Conceived around the concept of “neighborhoods” within waiting areas, the facility contains zones catering to different needs: connecting with clinicians, resting after treatment, or hanging around with loved ones. In-room innovations such as built-in workspaces for families and circadian lighting systems help relieve stress and combat anxiety not just for patients and their loved ones, but for staff as well.
The Family Commons at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital strives to address a seemingly intractable challenge: reducing anxiety around extremely difficult pediatric cancer treatments. The 45,000-square-foot space gives patients and their families a welcome sense of normalcy by integrating playful elements — think a music room and hidden bird icons for a mini scavenger hunt — to help children get back in touch with their imaginations. It also includes digital message boards inviting people to leave notes of encouragement and love for members of the broader St. Jude community.
Both MSK and St. Jude illustrate how built environments can, and should, play an active role in the care journey.
Humanizing the airport experience
An industry secret? Relaxed travelers spend money. When passengers feel calm enough to leave their immediate gate area — or to have their food delivered right to the gate — airport hospitality companies generate some of the highest revenue figures per departing passenger in the industry.
Airports, of course, are notoriously high-stress environments, but thoughtful design can reduce anxiety. Clear signage, cushy seating and convenient amenities might be the low-hanging fruit, but thoughtful lighting arrays, elevated (if not pricey) dining concepts and seamless technology integration all make the wait more pleasurable.
Take the JetBlue Terminal Lounge at JFK Airport in New York. Inaugurated in 2008, the terminal has featured dining and retail options that allow for exploration but keep passengers close to their gates. It pioneered innovations, such as the now-ubiquitous self-checkout kiosks, to mitigate even minor stressors like waiting for your dining check.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport has turned stress relief into an art. It features a quiet library where travelers can read, a meditation center for prayer and reflection, an indoor green space with trees and nature sounds, and an app that highlights dedicated quiet spaces.
When people aren’t glued to their gate, they’re more likely to shop, dine, explore — and remember what travel is all about.
All-access for every visitor
Designing to counter anxiety implicitly means designing to ensure everyone feels welcome. Particularly for venues, it’s about creating the conditions for fan inclusivity before, during and after the event.
The British Deaf Association advocates for more inclusive designs to make people with hearing challenges feel welcome. Like in nightclubs, these designs might include calm areas for people to take breathers. But they also might include prominent signage, wide pathways, sound level indicators and flexible seating — all features that can help people balance the excitement of an event with comfort and calm.
Venues and attractions can also counter anxiety at the queue by integrating thoughtful crowd choreography and timed entry tickets. Take, for example, the visitor experience at the Empire State Building Observatory. Guests wait in one queue from start to finish, but they’re met by over 40 individual exhibits ranging from large-scale projection-mapped features to single-user virtual viewers. Highlighted by an orchestra-accompanied, Lewis Hine-inspired video installation, visitors experience the queue not as a chore, but as a rich palette-whetter before the dizzying main course.
Or consider the experience inside the Las Vegas Sphere. Haptic seats and the largest high-definition LED screen in the world don’t necessarily suggest “calm design,” but invitations to respite are designed directly into the world’s largest spherical structure.
From the warm-hued, curved entryways beckoning visitors toward food and beverage options to the easy-access pedestrian bridge, the Sphere presents many invitations to wind down and spool up as the guest desires.
Museums require their own approach — nuanced, educational, and sometimes even somber — to fostering calm. The Paris Maritime Museum offers exhibits with immersive audio descriptions, tactile touchpoints, sign language interpretations and abridged versions of content to allow people of all ages and abilities to engage with its material. The result is a space that responds to the manifold ways people perceive and consume information.
Bringing nature into sharper focus
A variety of clinical studies have proven that exposure to nature reduces stress, relieves PTSD and ADHD, reduces sleep deprivation and boosts creativity. Designed to address heightened anxiety levels and bring the restorative effects of nature into the home, HomeForest is part multi-sensory wellness tool, part personal nature reserve — and all sanctuary.
The virtual platform employs digital twins and the Unreal Engine rendering platform to create naturalistic replicas of people’s homes. Kitchen sinks become forest streams, alarms morph into birdsong, and digital alerts register as gentle forest sounds. The project draws on the restorative experience of being in nature to create stress-relieving digital experiences.
Less anxiety, more empathy
Every aspect of our built environment presents an opportunity to create a more comfortable and inclusive world. Thoughtful design requires meeting people across all dimensions of their lived experience, which unsurprisingly requires extraordinary reserves of empathy. An environment should not just meet its core utility — whether it’s providing space to dance, learn, mourn or heal — but also work in ways large and small to counter anxiety.
Some solutions call for ambitious architectural forms and fiendishly complex technology. Others, as architect Lara Kinneir argues, are as simple as designing public bathrooms for new mothers. All of them require a singularly human approach that designers often fail to apply across physical, digital and even virtual environments.
Anxious? We’d call that a good starting point.
To learn more about designing to reduce anxiety, download our report ‘Multidimensional Healthcare: The Future of Patient Experience’ here:
