Design for Human Flourishing: a novel design approach for a more 'humane' architecture

Abstract

Architects today still highly rely on intuition attempting to handle more emotional, well-being-related design requests of clients. It seems that newly formed design demands present challenges that cannot be fully answered through the current existing design paradigms. Additionally, a ‘humanization’ trend in architectural design can be noticed of influences that steer architecture on a more ‘humane’ course, thereby advocating the viability of ‘well-being’ as a structured design approach in architecture. This paper aims to answer to this current momentum in architecture, by explicating a novel design approach called ‘Design for Human Flourishing’ (DfHF), based on a literature study of well-being theory through an architectural lens. Concretely, five well-being related attributes will be identified that define DfHF’s characteristics. Furthermore, what DfHF means in architectural practice will be illustrated via a design example.