For our team, "Wellness" is the condition created when people, place, culture, and systems are aligned to support physical health, emotional resilience, meaningful work, and play, social connection, and long-term vitality.
Wellness is understood as an active condition rather than a static state. It emerges through the ongoing interaction of multiple dimensions of human experience, including the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social, and environmental.
These dimensions do not operate independently. Wellness is sustained through their alignment and balance, rather than through optimization of any single domain. The body, the mind, and the spirit are engaged together, shaped by daily experience and reinforced through environments that support coherence across these dimensions.
For design, this means spaces are never serving a single function alone. Every environment simultaneously affects the body, the mind, and the spirit, and must be conceived as part of an interconnected whole.
Wellness is experienced personally, yet it is largely shaped by the environments in which people live. Built environments, natural systems, cultural and social contexts, and socioeconomic conditions all play a decisive role in whether wellness can be supported and sustained.
Individual wellness and collective wellness exist in constant relationship. Personal resilience, emotional regulation, creativity, and self-awareness develop alongside social connection, cultural continuity, and a sense of belonging. Wellness is therefore shaped not only by personal practice, but by the conditions created through place, systems, and shared experience.
For design, this underscores that form, materiality, access, and spatial relationships actively participate in shaping wellness outcomes, whether intentionally or not.
Wellness is closely tied to the quality of place and the lived experience of those who inhabit it. Landscape, climate, history, and culture influence how the body feels, how the mind engages, and how the spirit is expressed.
Wellness emerges through repeated, meaningful interaction with environments that support creativity, purpose, play, dignified work, and social connection. When place supports these experiences, wellness contributes to long-term vitality for both residents and visitors, strengthening communities and reinforcing continuity over time.
For design, this shifts the focus from isolated moments to cumulative experience, where the character of a place is as important as any single feature within it.
Because wellness is shaped by place, it functions as a guiding design lens rather than a discrete program or amenity. It informs how environments are planned, designed, and experienced, shaping architecture, landscape, material choices, spatial relationships, and programming.
When applied as a design principle, wellness becomes embedded in everyday settings rather than isolated in episodic experiences. Spaces are conceived to support movement, creativity, restoration, participation, and connection as part of daily life. Wellness-supporting infrastructure is treated as essential to the performance and quality of a place.
For designers, this means wellness is not added at the end of the process, but considered from the earliest decisions about layout, orientation, circulation, and use.
Taken together, wellness is understood as an ecosystem rather than a set of services or outcomes. It is the condition created when people, place, culture, and systems are aligned to support physical well-being, emotional resilience, creative expression, meaningful contribution, and long-term vitality.
In this framework, wellness is lived, shared, and sustained through the relationships among environments, experiences, and daily life, evolving across seasons, life stages, and generations.
For design, this reinforces that no single space carries the burden of wellness alone; it emerges from how all parts of the environment relate, connect, and support one another over time.