Why nature on the wall works

Why nature on the wall works

On what an image does to a room – and to the people in it.

Some rooms let us breathe more easily the moment we enter them. Others don't. We sense the difference long before we can explain it.

Part of that explanation hangs on the wall.

For a good forty years, research has been studying what looking at nature does to us – and for some years now also what looking at an image of nature does. The answers are surprisingly clear.

A window onto trees

In 1984, the architecture researcher Roger Ulrich published a small, unassuming study in the journal Science. He compared patients after the same operation, accommodated in the same rooms of a hospital in Pennsylvania – with a single difference: some looked out of their window onto trees, the others onto a brick wall.

Those who saw the trees needed fewer painkillers and were allowed to go home earlier.

It was the first study to describe the view of nature as a measurable factor in recovery. To this day it remains one of the most cited works in environmental psychology.

It doesn't have to be a window

The obvious question was: does only real nature work – or its image as well?

Ulrich and his team pursued it in 1991. They first put people under stress and then showed them photographic scenes: nature in one case, city in the other. Meanwhile they measured skin conductance, muscle tension and pulse. Those who saw nature recovered faster – not slightly, but markedly. And these were photographs. No forests, no gardens. Pictures.

This finding has since been confirmed many times. Nature images lower perceived stress, change the response of the autonomic nervous system and are now used deliberately in hospitals – as “positive distraction”, as the research calls it. A study from 2003, for example, showed that patients felt less pain during an unpleasant procedure when they looked at nature images while it was carried out.

Waiting feels different

Anyone who has ever sat in a waiting room knows the peculiar stretching of time. The researcher Upali Nanda has studied what images do to that time. In a study in emergency departments, her team observed the behaviour of people waiting after nature art had been brought into the rooms. The underlying assumption: how we feel determines how long a wait seems to us – and nature images shift the feeling.

It is also interesting which images work. In a preference study with patients, recognisable nature was clearly preferred to abstract or stylised art – even when the abstract works were among the bestsellers at online galleries. What pleases in the living room is not automatically what carries in a room full of tension.

The patterns we carry within us

There is a deeper level still. It lies not in the subject, but in its structure.

The physicist Richard Taylor of the University of Oregon has spent years studying how our visual system responds to so-called fractals – patterns that repeat at ever smaller scales. A fern. The branching of a bough. The veins of a leaf. The edge of a petal, in which the form of the whole appears once more.

Using eye tracking, EEG and functional imaging, Taylor's group was able to show that people respond almost automatically with relaxation to a particular kind of these patterns that is common in nature – clearly measurable in laboratory settings. Taylor describes this as a kind of resonance: the fractal structure of our visual system meets the fractal structure of the image, and something in us grows calm.

This is why I go so close to things. What is barely larger than a thumbnail to the naked eye carries the same patterns as an entire forest. Enlarge it, and you bring not just a blossom into the room. You bring in an order that our body recognises.

Where people work, too

That all of this applies not only to hospitals was shown by the occupational psychologist Craig Knight at the University of Exeter. He had people work in differently designed offices: bare and reduced – or enriched with art and plants. In the enriched rooms, people were noticeably more productive and complained less often of discomfort. Knight's conclusion after twelve years of research: never has a “lean”, pictureless workspace proved to be the better one.

What this means for a room

One can read these findings as numbers. But one can also read them as a very old experience that has now found a language: we came from nature, and our nervous system has not forgotten it. In interiors, where we spend most of our lives, something is missing for it. An image cannot undo that absence. But it can keep a connection open.

Architecture today calls this biophilic design – and counts the visual connection to nature among its most important patterns. A window onto the garden is the most beautiful form of it. An image is the one you can hang anywhere.

I do not claim that an image by Flourish makes you healthier. That would be saying too much, and it would not be honest. What I can say: research has shown for forty years that nature images do people and rooms good. And I do my best to make images that live up to this insight – in their calm, in their light and in the patterns they carry.

This is what I call Vital Art. Vital Art is art that does rooms and people good: images that calm the eye, create a connection to nature and make a place where we can arrive. I realise this in my nature portraits – images that show nature as a counterpart.

Further reading: the personal view of the same subject – Why even a glimpse of green changes something.

Sources

Ulrich, R. S. (1984). View through a window may influence recovery from surgery. Science, 224(4647), 420–421.

Ulrich, R. S., Simons, R. F., Losito, B. D. et al. (1991). Stress recovery during exposure to natural and urban environments. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 11(3), 201–230.

Diette, G. B., Lechtzin, N., Haponik, E. et al. (2003). Distraction therapy with nature sights and sounds reduces pain during flexible bronchoscopy. Chest, 123(3), 941–948.

Hathorn, K. & Nanda, U. (2008). A Guide to Evidence-based Art. The Center for Health Design.

Nanda, U., Chanaud, C., Nelson, M. et al. (2012). Impact of visual art on patient behavior in the emergency department waiting room. Journal of Emergency Medicine, 43(1), 172–181.

Taylor, R. P. (2006). Reduction of physiological stress using fractal art and architecture. Leonardo, 39(3), 245–251.

Knight, C. & Haslam, S. A. (2010). The relative merits of lean, enriched, and empowered offices. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 16(2), 158–172.

Browning, W. D., Ryan, C. O. & Clancy, J. O. (2014). 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design. Terrapin Bright Green.