Design for health and well-being: a case of synesthetic design

Several studies demonstrate the effect of sensorial stimuli on health and wellbeing. Paradoxically, healthcare facilities are often a source of aggressive sensations for their users. The conventional design approaches address this problem by trying to eliminate/minimize negative factors, working mostly to guarantee calm and privacy. A synaesthetic design approach, instead, places the scientific knowledge on human senses at the beginning of a design project, in order to address phenomena of sensory interactions between those sensations (i.e. pain), found to affect the general condition of well-being. The potentialities of a synaesthetic design approach are going to be discussed in this paper.