Designing for the Edges - inspired by the AUDE 2026 session on Wellbeing.

Designing for the Edges - inspired by the AUDE 2026 session on Wellbeing.

Nature doesn’t design for the average. A woodland offers canopy and clearing, shadow and light, the sound of water and the silence of deep undergrowth. It provides, simultaneously, prospect and refuge — and every nervous system that enters it finds what it needs.

15 Patterns of Biophilic Design* - codified something architects have always intuited: that human beings aren’t just in buildings, they are regulated by them. Dynamic light. Natural materials. Non-rhythmic sensory stimuli. Complexity held within order. These aren’t aesthetic preferences — they are neurological necessities, hardwired across millennia of evolution in living systems.

The best SEND schools in Britain already know this. Diffuse light that doesn’t assault. Acoustic warmth that doesn’t swallow speech. A view to something growing. A breakout space — refuge — from which the wider world can be safely observed. Pattern by pattern, the evidence-based language of biophilic design and the clinical language of SEND provision arrive at the same room.

But the specialist bubble pops at the school gate — and the gap between what we know good design can do, and what we actually build for adults, becomes a kind of quiet structural neglect. Offices. Acoustically brutal supermarkets. Homes designed for a kitchen-bathroom ratio, not a sensory one. 

One in five people are neurodivergent. Every human being is temporarily neurotypical at best — exhausted, grieving, ill, ageing. The curb cut (Selwyn Goldsmith) was designed for wheelchair users but ended up on every street corner because everyone needed it, design for the edges - benefitting all.

The SEND school isn’t a specialist outlier, nor is Biophilic Design. They are prototypes for everything else we should be making. What would it mean to design the whole world that way?

*Terrapin’s 15 Patterns of Biophilic Design, developed by Terrapin Bright Green (Browning, Ryan & Clancy, 2014; updated 2024) and brought to UK design practice through Nature Inside (RIBA Publishing, 2020).

Photographs - woodland bathing:
Bluebells, Crabwood, Hampshire, Spring 2026
Itchen Valley water meadows, Winchester, Winter 2025
Oxford University Botanic Garden, Harcourt Arboretum, Spring 2025