Bridging Neuroscience, Health, and the Built Environment: A Giving Smarter Guide

We spend 90 percent of our time indoors, and the spaces around us impact how we think, feel, and behave. We have all experienced environments that leave us feeling calm or focused, while others make us feel unwell, anxious, or even tired. Research in neuroscience and health is increasingly revealing why these responses occur, identifying how specific features of the built environment affect the brain and body. These findings can help create buildings and spaces that are designed to support health and well-being.

The emerging neurospatial design ecosystem brings together neuroscience, health, design, and related disciplines to combine research with practical application to create spaces that support healthier individuals, stronger communities, and resilient economies. In practice, neurospatial design can inform workplaces, hospitals, schools, residences, and other spaces that support well-being, while also helping to address pressing societal challenges such as brain disorders, chronic disease, urbanization, and the loneliness epidemic. Harnessing neurospatial design’s potential to shape the future of work, education, health care, and more will require close collaboration across many sectors—academia, industry, nonprofits, government, and philanthropy. However, engaging these sectors to align their efforts has proven challenging.

SPARC and The Pedersen Foundation have partnered to examine how to bring neurospatial design’s promise to fruition. Insights from more than 90 experts and an analysis of more than 580 relevant organizations informed the resulting Bridging Neuroscience, Health, and the Built Environment: A Giving Smarter Guide. The guide lays out neurospatial design’s core principles, key players, and challenges to broad adoption, and presents four interconnected philanthropic priorities as critical areas where investment can advance neurospatial design to improve human health:

1. Generate actionable evidence to enable implementation of neurospatial design
2. Build a robust, diverse talent pipeline
3. Fuel integration of neurospatial design across buildings and industry sectors
4. Expand neurospatial design awareness across sectors and society

Read the Giving Smarter Guide to learn more about neurospatial design and how leaders in philanthropy and beyond can drive the development of healthier buildings and spaces.

To read the report’s executive summary, click here.