EP 102: Designing the Stage for Better Health | Upali Nanda
Learn how an architect is setting the stage for better health by design, the relationship between neuroscience and architecture and design diagnostics.
Dr. Upali Nanda is Global Practice Director for Research at HKS, a 1500 person international architecture firm. She also teaches as Associate Professor of Practice at the Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning at University of Michigan and serves as the Executive Director for the non-profit Center for Advanced Design Research and Education (CADRE). She is the author of the book “Sensthetics: a crossmodal approach to designing for the senses”. Her widely published research on health and wellbeing, neuroscience and architecture, and outcome-driven design has won numerous awards. In 2015, Dr. Nanda was recognized as one of the top 10 most influential people in Healthcare Design by the Healthcare Design Magazine. In 2018, she was honored by Architectural Record with the Women in Architecture Innovator Award and in 2020 she was featured in the book on 100 women who changed architecture. Her design research is anchored on the art, and the science, of being human.
Episode mentions and links:
Upali on Point of Decision Design
Outcomes examples:
Upali’s restaurant suggestion: Roti Wraps at Jiti’s
Follow Upali: Twitter
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Bon Ku: Learn about how an architect is setting the stage for better health by design. We explored the relationship between neuroscience and architecture. We give examples of healthy design and the built environment. And talk about design diagnostics.
I'm Bon Ku the host of Design Lab, a show where we explore the question, how might we design healthier lives? Today's guest is Dr. Upali Nanda, she is the global practice director for research at HKS, which is a 1500 person international architecture firm. She also teaches as an associate professor of practice at the Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, and serves as the executive director for the nonprofit center for advanced design research and education.
Upali is the author of the book, “Sensthetics: A Crossmodal Approach to Designing for the Senses.” Her wildly published research on health and well-being, neuroscience and architecture and outcome-driven design has won numerous awards.
Upali was recognized as one of the top 10 most influential people in healthcare design by healthcare design magazine. She's been honored by architectural record with the women in architecture, innovator award. And she's featured in the book on 100 women who change architecture. Upali designed research is anchored on the art and the science of being human.
Check out our website, it's brand new, our producer, Rob Pugliese worked so hard at it, you can find it at designlabpod.com.
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If you haven't done so already go to apple podcasts or Spotify, support us by giving us five stars, leaving us a review. On the podcast show notes, you can sign up for our newsletter. You can also do that on the website. Now here's my conversation with Upali Nanda.
Upali welcome to Design Lab, I'm so thrilled that you are on the show
Upali Nanda: You are not half as thrilled as I am, Bon.
I'm so excited to be here.
Bon Ku: we go way back. We were just talking in 2017. You organize a panel at amazing conference, Stanford Medx, organized by Larry Chu, who is a previous guest on the Design Lab, and I just can't believe it was that long ago.
Upali Nanda: I know, and I remember the panel was called Did We Forget the Stage?
Bon Ku: Yes,
Upali Nanda: And I remember because I'd been at Medx the year before, absolutely loved it. And was struck by the fact that we were talking about such incredible innovation, but the architects and the planners and the designers were not in the room.
And so that was kind of our conversation that started saying it's in the theater of life. If architecture sets the stage or design of the built environment sets the stage, do we often forget the stage? We remember the actors, we remember the props, we remember the script, we remember the sets but sometimes, the built environment often gets forgotten.
Bon Ku: Yeah.
Upali Nanda: I remember that panel so well, because we had you, we had one more surgeon.
Bon Ku: Yep.
Upali Nanda: We had
Bon Ku: Another
Upali Nanda: an architect,
Bon Ku: and Monica, who is a, does everything but a lot of 3D printing and she's also trained as an architect as well.
Upali Nanda: Absolutely. She's a design thinker and an architect. She's a maker. It was amazing. Yeah.
Bon Ku: Now, that panel is almost. Representative of your expertise. You are trained as an architect, but you have expertise in all these other fields and, and you're interested in health.
So what inspired you as an architect to follow this path and be interested in how we design better health?
Upali Nanda: Now it started with an interest in " how we design for humans?" And in human perception and, it actually came out of a lack. When I was in architecture school, I always had these really multisensorial, experiential ideas, which I could never represent because our medium was visual, so I couldn't communicate entirely what I was conceptualizing in terms of a fully sensory experience, and I got fascinated by how the human brain works, how the human body works, how do we react to place, and that started this entire journey. My dissertation, which is published as a book called Synthetics, was all about sensory perception and how we designed for the sensors and how we distribute attention across our different sensory modalities and the whole experience of places of choreography. It's always changing. So we design something, we think it's permanent, but it changes moment to moment based on how a human interacts with it. And that got me really, really interested. So, when I did my thesis, I did all of these things around the human sciences and there was a point where Mar Shipley, who is a wonderful mentor, walked up to me one day and said, do you realize you've done everything you need for a certificate on health systems design?
I was like, really? I wasn't thinking in that way
Bon Ku: This wasn't like systematic. It was just like you were following your interest and
Upali Nanda: I was following my interest and I was following this deep passion for designing to humans, and communicating that which made me land in health where you have no choice. The stakes are so, you have no choice. I was actually in school, I had the privilege of being in class with Roger Aldrich.
Bon Ku: Oh really?
Upali Nanda: Ah-huh. I was one of his last batch of students, I'm guessing. And funny story, because I wasn't coming in from healthcare, I had no idea what a big deal he was. Right?
Bon Ku: Can you tell the audience how big of a deal he is?
Upali Nanda: Sure. So, Dr. Roger Aldrich is an environmental psychologist, considered one of the founders of the field of evidence-based design and most well known for his seminal work, on the impact of something simple like a view from a window. The study, I think, was in UPenn with one cohort of patients who had a view out of a window and one cohort that did not, and showed looking back at records from eight years, of patient data that those all other things being controlled for that patients who had a view out of the window, spent less time in the hospital, had fewer pain medications prescribed.
Bon Ku: Yeah, and I think these patients had gallbladder surgery
Upali Nanda: they had had gallbladder surgery and were recovering from it. So, fascinating paper published in science, I think the first time something about the built environment was published in science. I know our good friend Andrew Ibrahim is right now doing some work, to replicate those results. So, It was really interesting, like that work, truly spur this entire field of basing design decisions on evidence and showing that design has a direct relationship to health,
Bon Ku: Yeah.
Upali Nanda: In the story.
Bon Ku: that's a passion of yours, of linking design
to outcome.
Upali Nanda: Yes, absolutely. And I think it was born there, but I love telling the story because the naivete of being a student. , you never know what great minds you're surrounded by. You don't know it at the time. And I remember going into class and coming out and telling, a friend of mine in public health saying, I don't understand what the big deal is.
I mean, you look at a window, you look at a brick wall. Of course, if you look at a window compared to the brick wall, you get better. I had no idea about the dearth of evidence or how significant this body of work was, and I still remember what he said to me, this person from public health. Saying: "you have no idea if you can show such an incredible impact for something so tiny. Look at what he's done for your entire field."
Bon Ku: mm.
Upali Nanda: And I don't think I had framed it that way. I was like, yeah, we designers. We're always full of ideas of all the difference our designs can make. We don't always think about, is it proved out?
Bon Ku: Hmm. So when you were studying architecture, that wasn't something that was taught routinely about linking design to outcomes?
Upali Nanda: It still isn't. One of the things I'm privileged to do, I call myself a p academic, because I serve as the global practice director for research at a pretty large firm, H k s, with more than 1500 people. But I also get to spend part of my time teaching students in the University of Michigan. And so I'm a academic, I have a foot in academia.
and it's amazing because I get to see what we teach and I get to now take that message. From practice to academia and vice versa about how important it is to link design to outcomes, because just saying design can affect outcomes is not
Bon Ku: Yeah. Now tell us about, okay, there's a couple of tabs open here. So, as research director at a global architecture firm, that's an unusual
thing,
Upali Nanda: Mm-hmm.
Bon Ku: Most architecture firms, even big ones, don't have as robust of a research. Many of them probably don't have a research division, right? So, Tell us about that work.
Like what type of work do you do and why does an architecture firm have research?
Upali Nanda: so your right Bon that, it isn't practice it, it isn't well established practice to have a research division. But compared to a decade ago when I started in the field, I think when we, there was a point in time where there were three directors of research positions across the nation.
Bon Ku: Three only three?.
Upali Nanda: Like there was a time.
And now that's changed. Now most firms do understand, Research is important. There is a higher level of accountability in the field that we did not have before, in health in particular, in large part because of the field of evidence-based design, that accountability really has increased. And we are being held accountable to the outcomes that we have promised.
So that's a shift. There's a shift in how clients think there's a shift in how designers and architects think. And there's a growing awareness that if it can affect outcomes, then we have an ethical and a fiscal responsibility to measure what those outcomes were. But we needed a huge amount of research to really establish that link in the first.
Bon Ku: and it's a little similar to the practice that, physicians or researchers do if we're developing a new drug or a new procedure, we wanna do the research to show that new drug or procedure actually improves clinical outcomes. So, so is that the type of work that you do at HKS?
Upali Nanda: So it's, it definitely is the genesis, I think evidence-based medicine was the launch point for evidence-based design. The challenge with evidence-based design is the number of confounds and variables that you have to work through. So, doing a full randomized control trial isn't really feasible.
Bon Ku: Yeah, cuz you can't build a building and a placebo building and test in different cities and hold a all lot of
factors. Control for a lot of factors
Upali Nanda: So our happy medium in that has been understanding what we can do in practice. So for example, we do something called design diagnostics. Design diagnostics is similar to like a doctor does diagnostics before they tell you what you need. So designers should be going and understanding the current state in a very methodical way and diagnosing what your root issues are, operational health outcomes related, experiential, and then say, okay, what are we really designing for?
So that's been a big shift. So diagnostics and discovery have become part of our process. The second thing that we do is a lot of prototyping and testing, so mockups. Depending on what fidelity is, the right fidelity for the right question. Like we do a lot of prototype and testing. Sometimes it might be in VR, sometimes it might be full scale foam core mockups.
But let's try out the scenarios. Let's try out what we are trying to design and see. What the impact is? And then on the final end, after delivery, we try to make sure that we go back and measure outcomes. And if we have done the diagnostics, then the diagnostics data becomes a baseline. For what the performance evaluation does.
We do not call it post occupancy evaluation because there's nothing post about occupancy. Occupancy is a continuous and evolving thing, but we do call it, our health team talks about it, in terms of functional performance evaluations. And depending on what we are doing, like in workplace, we have a whole program for living labs, for example, workplace.
We try to measure continuously. With healthcare based on what data we can get, we do it at right points in time. And so much of course depends on the level of access an architect has to the final environment after it's operational. So that determines some of what we measure.
Bon Ku: Can you share a favorite case study that you have done or heard of where evidence-based design made a difference?
Upali Nanda: Sure! One of our favorite case studies is from ProMedica Hospital, in Toledo. So that was designed, it started back in 2014. We did diagnostics in 2015, so, did a lot of behavior mapping, shadowing, interviewing, survey data, whatever we could get our hands on in the tight amount of time that we have.
We did a lot of evidence-based design, so we looked at the literature that was out there. I actually remember when I first joined health. I was amazed by the number of times you would have a conversation about where should the toilet. Still to this date, you're like, where does the toilet go? We wrote a little tiny white paper that was called Where Goes the Toilet?
Bon Ku: Oh, I gotta look that up. That's cool.
Upali Nanda: scenario with pros and cons and the evidence supporting it, and understanding that so much depends on your operational model and what clinical services you have there.
But we did a lot of things. There was a very interesting moment, for example, where we realized that the biggest inefficiency in a particular, acute care unit was in the separation between the nutrition room and the meds and supplies. It was a very tiny insight. But it changed how we co-located med supplies and nutrition because in a single med event, we realized that the largest wasted walking was going to get that little thing called applesauce for when you have to give a med to someone, right?
So we did this, mapping of a nurse's journey on a single med event, realized all the points where space was making it so difficult, optimized for it. Transferred that into a script, which became a walking design tool, like a simulation tool that we still use. So every time we did a plan, we would rung that simulation and see what would it look like for a nurse to go from A to B for all of these different scenarios.
And also changed our standards when nutrition meds and supplies were co-located. Right? so very tiny example, but very
Bon Ku: I love that. Yeah. It's like software for the built environment and you're run running that software for new, new hardware. That's so cool. And what you're doing is giving back time to that nurse.
Upali Nanda: To spend more time on the bedside. And the other thing interesting about that software analogy bond is we realize that computational scripts have to understand human scripts.
Bon Ku: Mm.
Upali Nanda: So until they knew the human script, what do you do? Where do you go? Why do you go there? What is really beneficial? What's a waste?
We weren't even simulating the right thing. So just doing an adjacency analysis is not enough. The human script has to be overlaid on the space. And that became part of our, simulation. We opened during covid. It was a pretty incredible hospital still. There was a lot of things that were done for staff wellbeing, light accessibility to all staff members, et cetera, et cetera.
And then we wrapped it up with a performance evaluation, so we got outcomes at the end. So we could see an improvement in edge cap scores. We did see an improvement in sound levels and disbel levels, like ambient sound levels. So it was good to kind of go back, test against our hypotheses. One thing we do that the audience, might appreciate is we put together something called design intent documents.
So a design intent document. Is a document where your design intent is annotated on your design documents. So you are saying, I'm doing this for this reason, and these are my hypothesized outcomes,
and these are the metrics to which
Bon Ku: like you're doing this to give more time to the nurse or increase efficiency in the
Upali Nanda: So this will reduce walking distance. This will improve line of sight and patient satisfaction, and here is the metric associated with it.
And then you lay yourself open to measuring those metrics and understanding if something didn't work out the way it did, why? And I'll close out the story with the fact that when we went back, one of the biggest things we realized that the design intent that was evident and documented to the design and construction teams had not been shared with the operational teams the same way.
Bon Ku: Hmm.
Upali Nanda: And oftentimes the gap between design and outcomes is operat.
Bon Ku: Hmm.
Upali Nanda: So that was a big takeaway for us and for us to realize that maybe you need playbooks and things like, almost like instruction manuals that go with place because they're intentionally designed, intentionally operated, but that's not always communicated all the way through.
Bon Ku: Hmm. It's kind of like having a driver's manual for a car for example?
Upali Nanda: Yeah, it is. It really is. And the other example too Bon, which is not from healthcare, is in a live loan neighborhood. So around the same time where we designed a mixed use live loan neighborhood for UC San Diego, we had the same opportunity to measure student outcomes when they were in an existing campus.
And then after they moved to the new campus, it was a longitudinal study. It was a fascinating study because for this one we leaned on our nonprofit, the Center for Advanced Design Research and Evaluation, and we got research scholars on site. So that meant UC San Diego students for a couple of years gathered data.
and measured in the campus that they were actually on, and the provost was very visionary. She had this vision that capital projects should be learning instruments.
Bon Ku: Hmm.
Upali Nanda: And through that she really wanted to change curriculum. So the sustainability story became a sustainability studio. We started working with the psychology staff.
And then one of the data points that was fascinating for us to see is not only did we see an improvement in satisfaction, which is a simple thing to ask, but we saw a reduction in self-reported depression, which was very, Interesting. The journal article is just going in right now, so we'll, we'll,
see how that turns out.
But again, health is, health is everywhere.
Bon Ku: Yeah.
and is this what you're teaching to your students at the University of Michigan? And these are architecture students?
Upali Nanda: So yes, the class I teach is Health by Design. It's a seminar. We've been lucky, it is architecture students. We've also had, HCL like human computer interaction, students, social work students, sometimes medical students. It's meant to be a cross-disciplinary seminar, but they get to design and they get to design concepts, and put it out there.
So it's been a lot of fun. The latest class was around primary care by design. So we did brain health by design, aging, by design, mental health by design, point of decision design, which is something we've done a lot of work on. And then this one was primary care, and they came up with ideas. Like, for example, why isn't the primary care, first point of contact in the school nurse?
Bon Ku: Hmm
Upali Nanda: Like what would happen if in the school at that first point of contact, the school nurse was linked to the pediatrician? How would that change? So in academia, you can really think about the ideal world and in practice you get to prototype and test it and say, yeah, not quite ready yet, but we'll get there.
Bon Ku: Well, how does that relate to like the built environment and architecture that seems like a more of a system design.
Upali Nanda: I love that prompt. Bon, I think the biggest challenge for our field is that we have started from the built environment. We can't start from the built environment. We have to start from the system and then understand what the built environment manifest is. So, all of the designs had a built-in environment component.
They actually had to decide for this physical manifest, what would the digital manifests be, because that's become inarguable right now.
Bon Ku: Yeah, and you've talked about this before too, right? That the relationship between the digital and the physical, they're not so separate anymore. It's very fluid to go between those two interfaces. And . We're seeing then healthcare too, of like your first experience in healthcare may be a digital.
Upali Nanda: Mm-hmm.
Bon Ku: that will, will actually bring you into a brick and mortar healthcare facility, but often it's going and having a virtual visit with a doctor instead of going to the doctor's office.
Upali Nanda: Absolutely right. I think my, colleague Deborah Winer, who leads health now, does a lot about the digital front door. Like it's, it's changed. And
Bon Ku: Oh, I love that. I, I don't think the audience, can you talk about the digital front door?
Upali Nanda: the digital front door is that, that's your first point of entry. You start with the digital front door, that's where you enter the system, and then your physical touchpoint is sporadic and it's as needed, but the digital tends to be more of a continuum. Especially if you do it right, like that's a great way of maintaining a relationship with a system. And then the physical manifest because, you're always somewhere. You're always somewhere, so figuring out what does it mean for you and I to have this conversation? What do I need in my environment? What do you need in yours for us to then have that person to person interaction? The IRL interaction, what would that need?
We actually did the phrasing we've used often as cloud, print and footprint.
Bon Ku: Well, I love that. Cloud print versus
footprint.
Upali Nanda: So every interaction, you look at the experience and you say, okay, what ha has to happen in the footprint? What happens in the cloud print? What keeps moving back and forth? And that's how you decide your physical and digital systems
Bon Ku: Hmm.
Upali Nanda: in place. So it's an interesting time for the profession because we cannot start with the building.
The building is a means for something bigger. Which means we have to start with systems. The two frameworks we use consistently, one is linking design to outcomes, and the second is the design continuum. The design continuum means you think about whatever it is you're designing for, and then what information design do you need?
What product design do you need? What interior architecture or urban design do you need, and what policy design do you need? unless we look at it that way, somehow we, we always drop the ball between the boundaries or the silos of disciplines.
Bon Ku: Yeah.
Upali Nanda: So every discipline has done its work really well, but the system's not seeing the outcome.
And that really means we need to blur those boundaries very intentionally.
Bon Ku: and the pandemic has definitely blurred those boundaries. And for those of us who are more u used to working in the physical footprint, had to jump into the cloud print for a know telehealth, for example. A lot of doctors were forced into telehealth and, probably teachers who were used to teaching students in a classroom. Were forced to use Zoom and there is this blending of these two worlds.
Upali Nanda: Truly is. I mean, I'm curious, born from your perspective, like as an emergency department physician, how, what was that like for you?
How did you navigate?
Bon Ku: Well, for me it's not, too different cuz I still had to work. You know, I can't have that cloud print. Uh, But I've . Saw with many patients who saw their specialist or saw their primary care doctor, like these visits were a lot of 'em were virtual and I did not see, or did not experience a decrease in care.
And sometimes I saw that patients actually had, better access because that door was usually more open, the digital door rather than the physical door. Right. They just had to. Make a virtual telehealth appointment or, or they call the office. And I saw that documenting in the electronic health record versus like them having to wait weeks to communicate with that physician.
Upali Nanda: Love that.
I would've loved to shadow you during that time.
Bon Ku: oh. It was a little scary. before the vaccines.
Upali Nanda: You. You made me think of something in the shift I'm seeing in the industry overall is I think people are realizing that to get to outcomes, you have to design your strategy first, your experience next, then your operations and your facility design follow.
Bon Ku: Mm,
which is reversed from before, right?
Upali Nanda: which is reversed from before, like you look at these programmatic elements and you say, where did this come from?
Like, what does it tell you to have a waiting room in the program? The assumption is you will wait. Right? So programmatic elements have assumptions. Those are operational assumptions and they're, experiential assumptions. It's helped us to get into like flipping it and saying, what are we designing?
What's the strategy? What service lines will you really be designing for? What is the experience you want to get that? What do you need in operations? What do you need in the built environment? And then let's prove it out by saying, this is our hypothesis. Did it really work out the way we attend
Bon Ku: And you gave me some examples of some of your favorite healthy designs, either in the US or other parts of the world, cuz you have a very global experience. you know, grew up in India, went to college there, and you also studied in Singapore, then you got your PhD in Texas. What are some examples of your favorite examples of healthy design, whether it's in a built environment or urban planning?
Upali Nanda: It's such a good question, Bon, and we should be rattling off examples, right? But very rarely are our favorite examples of healthy environments in healthcare environments. So the healthy environment I can think of is gardens. Like when I was in Singapore, I would love going to the Chinese and Japanese gardens.
Like that was my favorite place.
Bon Ku: They're amazing they're all over.
They're
not like, you have to go out of the city, like they're, like in the city. You, you are actually stumbling over them as you're walking or
Upali Nanda: Literally little pockets of green. And I've noticed, a lot of the innovation we are doing seeing right now, for example, is coming out of this, big hospital we are doing in Singapore. And it's really interesting to see because they have taken an entire warehouse where they're prototyping and testing everything that they're putting,
Bon Ku: Mm. Wow.
Upali Nanda: and they have a big biophilic driver.
and they're going through this process of doing strategy, operations experience, and then facility, which has been very interesting to see. But Singapore is such a dense city and has so many of these pockets of respite where you can go in and get fresh air, and that's been very interesting to see. some of their buildings look like they have gardens pouring out of them. Like force at like Right. It's like hard to explain. You just have to go see pictures of it. But I'm like, I remember passing by a building. I'm going, it looks like there's trees coming out from the side of a building.
Bon Ku: So, so even though, so some people use this argument of like, oh, well the city's like, Dense and urban for there to be biophilic design, but that's not true.
Upali Nanda: That is not true at all. Yeah. Some of the best examples of Bio Ophelia are in the vertical fac. Treatment that you're starting to say and, the best innovation often comes out of constraints.
Bon Ku: Mm-hmm.
Upali Nanda: Singapore is landlocked and it has to be in harmony with the ocean. it has to, to survive. So reclaiming land, doing a lot of that is just really important for survival.
And so you see these strategies, that are great for human health, but they're great for environmental health. And that's the biggest shift I think that we've seen is planet health and people health are merging now. They are not separate drivers anymore. It was long overdue, but something simple like air quality.
We've talked about it in terms of infection rates for years, but now we are talking about air quality for just healthy living
and it helps you. To have environmental sustainability, to get better air quality that helps you with healthy living and reduces infection. So, I think it's a good time to see how these fields are blending too.
Example from India, courtyard houses like residences, homes, bungalows with courtyards within them. So how you create microenvironments with full passive ventilation and management as well. Like, it's just, it's, we've really, really managed to have, I can still feel the breeze. Of being in a courtyard, that I miss so much in our glass boxes.
Bon Ku: Yeah. and that's like old school design.
Upali Nanda: It's old school design, it's passive design and it's vernacular design. There is a lot in the vernacular that is actually deeply scientific.
Bon Ku: And I bet you so many of us who have lived in cities, , especially during the pandemic, would have loved a courtyard design.
Upali Nanda: I know, I know. Our breath became hostage right during the pandemic and just a little bit of fresh air was a bonus.
Bon Ku: Yeah.
Upali Nanda: Yeah.
Bon Ku: I mean, I wish all hospitals had courtyard design of staff to go out for a little bit of respite. Cause I, I remember that of going, I just want. To take off my mask and get some fresh air, but there's currently no place to do that.
Upali Nanda: Yeah.
Bon Ku: Like I wouldn't want to go into into the staff break room because there would be other staff in there, we all have our mask on off and we go, this is probably the most dangerous place to be right
Upali Nanda: Yeah. Yeah. Just a little window for like five seconds of fresh air and breathability. Yeah, and I think there's so much in the microenvironment space that we can and are exploring to get there. But yeah, air is a big part of it. And breaks, I think the caregiver burnout, the huge burden on caregivers right now.
I mean, Bon, like, the fact that you're getting the time to have this conversation and looking relaxed while having it, that's a testament to you,
Bon Ku: Well, this is a break for me. I get to hang out with amazing people like you.
Upali Nanda: but it is, it's been amazing. It's not been fair.
Bon Ku: Before we wrap up this conversation, I want, to talk about, your interest between the fields of architecture and neuroscience. I know you've done a lot of work in that.
Upali Nanda: Sure. That also was born out of the dissertation work that I was talking about, so that's where I discovered I became one of the, we were called pioneers, but it really meant naive, passionate students
Bon Ku: Oh, come on. You're a pioneer.
Upali Nanda: But that was when Anfa was created, was the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture. It's based out of the Saul Institute and UC San Diego. It's a group of architects and neuroscientists working together to find the intersections. and I think it's been really interesting to unlock the potential of design when you understand or unlock the potential of the human mind. So the understanding how we think and feel gives us so much more agency in how we design and the kind of outcomes we'll get. One of the things we are doing right now as part of that commitment on the HKS side a partnership with the Center for Brain Health and the partnership is based on this big, huge movement that we are starting to see, which is shifting the narrative from mental health to brain health and taking that preventive approach, really changing the way we talk about mental health and the stigma associated with it.
So for us, brain Health has become this umbrella initiative, which is about cognitive fitness.
What am I really doing to stave off burnout? How am I connecting paying attention, focusing, being creative, like creativity is great for brain health. Something that we hadn't realized until we got into that.
So there's a lot of research that we are trying to do on how place can promote brain health, can promote cognitive and emotional affordances. That will get us to the outcomes we are looking for and reduce some of this burden that we have put on ourselves, ironically,
Bon Ku: Mm.
Upali Nanda: in many ways. So leveraging the power of place, and really going straight to the brain health and mental health objectives because we've done a better job with physical health than we have with mental health.
Bon Ku: Yeah. And it's a paradigm shift of. Thinking about brain health for more of a community lens rather than mental health, I think is often seen as individualistic. Like, what is wrong with me? Versus, you know, what is wrong with our communities, our environments, the way that we have designed them? How can we think about the collective brain health of a community rather than focusing on one, one
Upali Nanda: true. And the fact that connecting on the community is actually better for your individual brain. Like so much evidence that shows that socialization has not just psychological, but neurological impact. We know it. So I think it's a huge case, and I always share this very depressing, not depressing, but a statistic that we in the health field should be aware of that we do know that from a public health standpoint, you could go across neighboring, zip codes and have a 10 year drop in mortality
Bon Ku: Yeah.
Upali Nanda: at the same time.
Wellness is a 4.3 trillion dollar industry. And the biggest bubble of that is individual health and wellness and beauty products,
Bon Ku: yeah.
Upali Nanda: right? So the shift or the balance, this lesson of my health can directly impact your health and your health can directly impact mine. And if we put a little bit, not all of it, but if we put a little bit into our community, it benefits us as individuals.
I think that's still a long way to go, but we have been seeing the coming together of healthcare systems, housing, senior living and retail and mixed use, and I think it's an exciting time where health becomes a multi typology challenge.
Bon Ku: Hmm. I love that. I wanna end our conversation by asking you if a listener were to come visit you, where would you take them out to eat in your neighborhood?
Upali Nanda: Such a good question. I think I would take them out to this very tiny Indian place where you get the best wraps called Jiti's and it's a little hole in the world place, but it has the best roti wraps ever. And they would get really, really spicy food and then we would have some kundai to drink it down and we'd be very happy people.
Bon Ku: Lovely. What's a restaurant called? Jiti's I'll put a link to that for the listeners. I don't know if Upali can join you, but if you are in Michigan, that's a place to go.
Upali Nanda: Absolutely.
Bon Ku: Well, this was so much fun. It was so good to, reconnect with you. Thanks for doing this. I know you have a super busy schedule, but really, really appreciate you coming on
Upali Nanda: Likewise. Bon this has been a joy. Thank you for all that you do.
Bon Ku: I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Upali. You can find her on Twitter at U P A L I N A N D A. And reach out to me on Twitter at B O N K U on Instagram at D R B O N K U. And Design Lab is produced by Rob Pugliese. Editing by Fernando Queiroz, theme music was created by Emmanuel Houston and the cover design by Eden Lew. See you next week.
