OutcomesRocket_Don Ruggles: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Saul Marquez:
Hey Outcomes Rocket listeners! Thank you so much for tuning in today. I’m so excited to really cover a fun topic today. And for that, I have the amazing Don Ruggles joining us. Don is a practicing architect and CEO of Ruggles Mabe Studio, an award-winning boutique residential architecture and interior design firm based in Colorado. Founded in 1970, the firm is dedicated to the idea that beauty can improve the lives of its clients, representing more than 1000 projects spanning 16 states and 8 countries, he’s doing some incredible work. In 2017, he published his first book called Beauty, Neuroscience and Architecture: Timeless Patterns and Their Impact on Our Well-Being, which investigates how timeless forms and patterns and design affect our health and well-being. The book was made into a full-length documentary in 2020, which you all have to see, Built Beautiful: An Architecture and Neuroscience Love Story with narration by Martha Stewart. It suggests that there’s this new, urgent effort needed to refocus the direction of design to include quality of beauty as a fundamental, overarching theme in two of man’s most important fields, the built and artistic movements. So it’s such a treat to have Don join us today. With that intro, Don, I want to welcome you to the podcast.
Don Ruggles:
Oh, thank you so much. That’s a very generous introduction, so glad to be with you today.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, listen, you’ve done such amazing things, and I’m excited to dive into this concept of health and well-being through the surroundings. And before we dive into some of the details of the work that you’re doing, Don, we’d love to understand more about what makes you tick. What got you involved in this space that you’re in?
Don Ruggles:
Well, that’s a story about an event that I was asked to speak at back in 2009, and I was given the topic of timeless design, and I was having some difficulty kind of crafting the talk, and I ran across an organization that had newly formed at that time called the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, and combining science and design, that has always been an interest of mine. But what I found from the Academy of Neuroscience and Architecture was they were doing some fascinating research, and it really underpinned the talk that I gave. While I had such an amazing response to the talk, a lot of questions and requests for additional information, I did some more research and gave the talk again. And again, this is in 2009 and 10, and I had better, even better response, so I did more research and it, along I went, and then people started to say, well, this is such a fascinating topic, you really should write a book. When that led to my meeting with the publisher and the commitment from a publishing company. And subsequent to that book being published, I’ve been giving lectures all across Europe and even India, Asia, and then all across North America. So it’s been my responding to people that have heard my talk or read my book and kind of developing additional information. Well, I’ve been in this profession for 50 years now. This may be one of the most exciting times for me in the history, I think, of this profession, and it has to do with neuroscience and neuro-aesthetics. And it’s incredible, once you start to apply these principles to architecture and design, what the realizations are, and ramifications, and also positive. So it’s just incredibly, exciting time for me as an architect and I think for, potentially for the entire profession, frankly.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, it’s fascinating, and, you know, there’s so much to be, that we need to learn about this. So I’m excited about our time with you today, Don. So chat with us about some examples, you know, and in particular, what’s your company doing to add value in this health ecosystem and help paint a picture for us? Is it designing hospitals? Is it clinics? Is it homes? Like, can you help us understand where this type of design is happening?
Don Ruggles:
Well, before I dive specifically into that question, I want to let you know that we’re working with some amazing thought leaders here in North America primarily, that’s mostly where our neuroscience network is, and that’s the organization, Science and Design, led by Mike Peterson and Linda Kafka, and then there’s Human Architecture and Planning Institute, which is led by Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander, and the neuroscientist on that board is Alexandros Lavdas, a remarkable, remarkably talented person. Here locally in Denver is Meredith Banasiak, who is one of the leaders and early adopters of combining architecture with neuroscience. Then we’re also working with Anjan Chatterjee at the Neuroaesthetics Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. Occasionally we’ll work with Colin Ellard at Waterloo University, and Susan Maximum at Johns Hopkins, and these are all remarkable people that are doing cutting-edge research and providing leadership for the profession that is just absolutely remarkable. And I urge all of your listeners to take a minute to look into any one of these professionals and the work they’re doing because it really is quite impactful. Our company has been looking at, most specifically, how do you create environments that create a pleasure response. Now human beings have really two responses to their environment, and that’s survival and pleasure, and if you’re in a survival response that is stress-inducing, that’s actually changing your physiology in a way that elevates your heart rate and elevates your blood pressure and causes, it can cause chronic stress response, which is not healthy. There are all sorts of, as you know, ramifications to long-term stress. So what we’ve been looking into is architects is how do you focus more on pleasure response? And some people would refer to it as a beauty response. I think more broadly we like to refer to it as stress-free or pleasure response, and human beings evolved, our brains evolved to protect us. I think a Nobel-Prize-winning scientist called our brain the most sophisticated surveillance system that’s ever been devised. We have remarkable abilities to intuit survival and stressful situations, situations that we’re not comfortable with neurologically. Now, what you have to understand is that our brains process up to 11 million bits of information per second. Almost all of that happens, that processing happens subliminally, we’re just simply not aware of it, it’s estimated that 50 of those bits per second are we conscious of. So clearly, our life is being processed below the surface, below our conscious awareness, at the subliminal level. Well, there are some significant things that happen at the subliminal level for architects due to our evolution before there were ever buildings, there were patterns that human beings over millions of years became used to that was ingrained into or embedded in our DNA, and those patterns are still with us today. So when we see a pattern that’s threatening, we automatically react to in a stress-inducing way, and when we see a pattern that’s pleasure-inducing, likewise, we will react to it in a stress-relieving pleasure manner. So this obviously applies to architecture because exciting and unique architecture patterns or forms, really aggressive, sharp-angled forms, for example, can cause stress. It’s not healthy for us, whereas patterns that have more curvature to them or a more familiar geometric pattern, such as the facial pattern or biophilic patterns, patterns in nature, fractals, those are stress-relieving, pleasure-inducing pattern schemes, so this is really important for hospital design and healthcare design. Why? Because already when a person arrives at the clinic, they’re on an elevated status of stress alert because they’re not well, they’re there because they don’t feel well, and they’re seeking comfort, they’re seeking pleasure, they’re seeking to become well. Well, if the patterns that they encounter, bad color schemes, bad lighting schemes, angulated geometries that we don’t understand neurologically, then that stress environment that they’re already living in is only heightened. So what we’re trying to do as architects is look at the patterns that support stress-relieving design, and it’s not all that complicated. It’s, because of our evolution there are some fundamentals that we can utilize that automatically reduce our stress.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, that’s, Don, that’s really very interesting. This concept that our brains are used to certain patterns that make us feel pleasure, we’re comfortable with, and there’s patterns that do the opposite of that. So how do we go about incorporating some of these things into our environment?
Don Ruggles:
Well, it starts from the minute you plan a facility. Recently I worked with a group in the UK, John Simpson & Nicholas Boyce Smith, two of the, kind of, thought leaders in the UK with this entire movement, and we were asked to work on re-envisioning hospital design in the UK, and it was, our program is known as Complete Hospital System, and that, what we did is develop a pattern book, a series of patterns that an administrator can use when they’re first planning a new facility to help them, or help guide them, through the decision making process from day one all the way until occupancy. And it’s utilizing these geometries, and biophilia, and color systems, and proper lighting, and how you site a hospital is really important, where you put it. John Simpson recently built a facility in the UK called the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre, DMRC for short, and it’s in a rural area, not urban, and they utilize gardens and courtyards and then also geometries that humankind is familiar with. So the geometries are not stress-inducing, the colors are not stress-inducing, lighting is soft and acceptable, and then biophilic concepts with materials on the interior, and then also visually through the glass to exteriors that’s calm and stress relieving. So, and those gardens end up being a really important part of the rehabilitation. Well, what they found from this large hospital that they built is that there’s been less requirement on pharmaceuticals, shorter recuperation times, and also this is really important for the industry to hear, they’ve been able to attract and retain better staff because of better working environment. And I think that’s one of the things that’s often overlooked is, where we’re patient-focused, if we don’t provide a great environment for the staff, then burnout happens, and you don’t retain the staff, and then you have significant turnover, costs to recruit new staff, and then even increased pay to retain your staff because of improper or poor working environments. So this facility that John Simpson and his team designed is really a remarkable example. We took the, what John and his team learned from that facility and applied it to an urban environment. And how would we incorporate a hospital? Let’s say we’re locating it into an existing urban fabric that, and we’ve got all kinds of scale issues, and circulation issues, and quality of life issues for existing inhabitants. And how do we do that? Well, we developed a whole pattern system that these administrators can use to check off the decision-making process as they go through the design so that they end up in a really, really positive health and well-being supporting environment for the staff as well as the patients.
Saul Marquez:
That’s a really great example and I’m sure, Don, that, I don’t know what you call it, DRMC?
Don Ruggles:
Correct.
Saul Marquez:
Okay, I’m sure there’s articles on it. We’ll definitely post those articles for folks to learn more about in the show notes of today’s podcast, fascinating example of the work that Don and his team are doing. And what about for health systems with existing property, right? There’s so many buildings out there, you know, that are looking to potentially optimize what they already have. What are your thoughts on that?
Don Ruggles:
Well, biophilic concepts are one of the easiest schemes to incorporate into your environment internally as well as externally. And by internally I mean the utilization of textures and colors and materials that humankind is used to seeing. And unfortunately, glass and steel are not on that list, or even hard plaster, but wood is and textural tiles are, and proper colors on the wall with artwork that reflect nature in some way. And I’m sure most of your listeners have heard about this before, but I think it’s important to realize that you’ve got to have some natural textures and colors on the interior. And then importantly, it’s what you see out the window, that also is equally important and can be quite impactful. So if it’s a nature scene, even just looking into a tree canopy so that the building isn’t above the height of the trees that are adjacent to the property, that helps a lot with relaxing a person, putting them into a stress-free neurological processing. And, you know, your brain is processing these massive amounts of data that I just mentioned, and it’s looking for ways to shortcut because there’s just too much information coming in. So your brain is constantly putting what’s it’s processing into groups that it knows how to process, and if, the more efficiently it can group things, and biophilic is one of the groups that the brain would process into, then the more relaxed you are because when your brain has to stop and try to process what it’s looking at, though, that’s called stress, and that’s what we’re trying really hard to avoid.
Saul Marquez:
That’s fantastic, very, very interesting. And what’s been one of the most unique findings you’ve made in your history here? You’ve been doing it for so long, Don. What’s been something that was surprising and now you do routinely?
Don Ruggles:
I grew up as a modern architect trained and Beaux-Arts concepts, and the most unique thing to discover through all of this is to realize that there were patterns prior to the bauhaus that architects and designers were using routinely that were discarded. And those that were used routinely were actually stress-relieving, pleasure-inducing patterns, and they had evolved over thousands of years of trial and error by architects or designers or even just normal human beings building out their environment. And so I think the most unique thing to realize here is that old patterns, patterns that have been developed over thousands of years, actually have so much validity. And this is being substantiated by neuroscience, I think Ann Sussman, that the Human Architecture and Planning Institute is doing a lot of work with eye tracking and visual attention software and biomimicry, and this is amazing, that these patterns consistently draw people’s eyes, whereas looking at an uncentered, repetitive grid-like facade draws no attention whatsoever. It’s just fascinating to see in eye-tracking experiments that modern design is actually quite off-putting. In fact, the brain doesn’t even want to look at it. So, and that not wanting to look at it is causing additional stress and processing, and it’s, we’ve found that it’s just not good for our health.
Saul Marquez:
Amazing. So was it like the Library of Alexandria type of deal where it’s lost forever, or were some of these patterns recovered and can we learn from it?
Don Ruggles:
We’re still using them today.
Saul Marquez:
Nice.
Don Ruggles:
Let’s say our federal Capitol building is made up of those patterns over and over, as is the White House. It’s, it tends to be more centered design, so we call it left-center-right-top-center-bottom, and it’s, roots back to this, it’s a facial pattern. Now, a facial pattern is made up of a grid, a three by three grid, and when you take a picture on your iPhone, you know, the grid comes up, and there it is, one, two, three, by one, two, three. So it’s a pattern that humankind is quite familiar with. But when a child is born, you know, they can’t see well at all, but a child has to find a face to survive, and that’s part of our DNA. A child knows it can’t survive on its own. So the pattern that the child is looking at, or looking for initially, it’s two eyes in a mouth, the three kind of dark spots. So this child doesn’t see particularly well when first born, it’s quite fuzzy. So what happens here, and this isn’t my theory, this is a biological theory, is that the child bonds with the caregiver and is, their gaze is fixated on this pattern, and the pattern comes to represent love and trust and bonding and empathy. And that neurological processing of love and pleasure, coming from that pattern, stays with us for the rest of our lives. So when we see it in a building or on an interior elevation or in an elevator lobby in the hospital, then it’s automatically, intuitively, instantaneously stress-relieving. And it’s, so that’s just one of the patterns. There are other pattern schemes that we evolved with that have similar effects, biophilia and curvatures from the human body to name two.
Saul Marquez:
That’s so fascinating, Don. And, you know, the challenge with these podcasts, the kind of good thing, too, is you get these really amazing like tidbits of info and they often leave you wanting more. So this was a fantastic opportunity to learn from you, and I’m just kind of curious what the other patterns are. So what would you recommend? Like, what would you recommend? Like, can we go to your website? Like, what is the best place to continue learning with you? Whether it’s watching the movie, which we could link to the show notes or whatever, like tell us what we could do from here because this was fantastic.
Don Ruggles:
Thank you, so as I mentioned, I wrote a book and it’s titled Beauty, Neuroscience and Architecture, and there’s great resources listed in the back of the book, which is kind of a roadmap for further investigations, and so that would be one thing. And then the movie has quite a bit of information, over 20 professionals in the movie from around the world talking about this in depth. So, and it’s available on Amazon Prime, and Apple.com, and YouTube.
Saul Marquez:
Awesome.
Don Ruggles:
The movie’s titled Built Beautiful, and then my website is www. neuro n e u r o hyphen architectology, and that’s a r c h i t e c t o l o g y.com. Well, there are many papers listed on the website under resources, so that would give your listeners the opportunity to dive even deeper into this. So, listen, there are new discoveries every day, and this is not just here, you know, in Denver, Colorado, or in North America, this is a global effort. And I’m connected with scientists all over the world that are looking into this, and it’s a new coming model for architects. And here’s a quote from a research physician at the University of Texas, and she says that, architects and designers have a greater opportunity to affect public health than medical professionals by embracing this information. Well, that is a profound statement in terms of the architecture profession. So anyway, if anybody wants to contact me, email me. I’m on Twitter, it’s @dhruggles. Anything I can do to help, anybody, I’m glad to help out.
Saul Marquez:
That’s fantastic, and what’s the email, Don?
Don Ruggles:
That would be Don@RugglesMabe M A B E.com
Saul Marquez:
Outstanding, folks, we’ll leave all of the resources that Don just shared in the show notes, a link to his movie, a link to his website, ways to get in touch with him. What an incredible opportunity to use our surroundings to improve health and wellness. Don, thanks for educating us today, this was a true pleasure.
Don Ruggles:
Well, thank you so much, Saul. It’s been great to be with you. Anything I can do to help, let me know.
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