I believe well-designed places and objects can actually improve healing, while poor design can inhibit it.
Interpretation
Good design can enhance healing processes, while bad design can hinder them.
This quote emphasizes the importance of design in environments and objects where healing takes place, such as hospitals and homes. Michael Graves suggests that thoughtful and well-executed design can create an atmosphere conducive to recovery, whereas poorly designed spaces may create stress and discomfort, ultimately affecting a person's ability to heal.
In practice
Using this quote to inspire an architecture firm focusing on healthcare buildings.
Form must never trump function. Some objects are made to look so smooth, you don't know where to pick them up or how to turn them on. If I'm designing a garlic press or cheese grater, I need my hand to fit comfortably on it. I like to know, instinctively, how to use it.
Good design should be available to everyone - and I do mean everyone. What I spent on the wheelchair I'm in could buy a small Mercedes. It's not only unfair to me; it's unfair to someone who's indigent but has the same needs. My goal is to make all objects affordable.
We've taken on health care in a big way in our office, ever since nine years ago when I was paralyzed. I was in eight different hospitals, three different rehab centers, and all the rooms were dreadful. As an architect, designer, and patient, I can do something to help.
Instead of using the machine as a metaphor for architecture, as Le Corbusier did, I use the human body. I want the public to know that it's them I'm designing for.
Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them.
Each of the substances of a man's diet acts upon his body and changes it in some way and upon these changes his whole life depends.
The choices you make each day in your diet and lifestyle have a direct influence on how your genetic predisposition is expressed - for better and for worse. You're only as old as your genes, but how your genes are expressed may be modified by exercise, diet and lifestyle choices much more than had previously been believed - and more quickly.
Having an eating disorder doesn't show ‘strength.’ Strength is when are able to overcome your demons after being sick and tired for so long. Starving is not a ‘diet’ and throwing up isn't something that only extremely thin men or women do. Eating disorders do not discriminate..Neither does any other mental illness. These are deadly diseases that are taking lives daily. So please, let's be cautious of the words we use when discussing ED's and other mental illnesses.
What the American public thinks is very important to the future of global health. Many people are moved by the idea that there is unnecessary suffering in the world, and we could do a lot to stop it. We have the technologies necessary to stop most of the suffering.
No one can listen to your body for you... To grow and heal, you have to take responsibility for listening to it yourself.
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