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.
Cancer is a growth hormone for empathy, and empathy makes us useful to each other in ways we were not, could not have been, before.
Shift work, where the body clock is continuously changed, is really deleterious on many levels - from psychology to physiology.
We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.
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.
I've found that if I tell somebody 'Eat this and don't do that,' it's not only not helpful, it's counterproductive because even more than being healthy, we want to feel free and in control, and as soon as somebody tells us to do something, there's a tendency to do just the opposite.
The natural force within each of us is that greatest healer of all.
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