Blame the lighting

Updated 26th August 2026. Added new atlas finder. Some edits.

On biophilic design, the science of fluorescent light and daylight, and the small, cheap changes that bring nature back into where we work

It's hot. Properly hot. Spring in England has started resembling a high summer, and I'm standing in a field of barley with the odd poppy nodding through it, holding a Zoom recorder and trying not to look too sketchy to anyone walking by. I'm scanning the surroundings – not for wildlife, but for people, because I've not yet mastered the art of recording a podcast in public without feeling I owe people an explanation of what I'm up to.

The subject, appropriately enough, is nature. Or rather a high-falutin' phrase for it: biophilic design. I'm out in a field making the case that we ought to bring more of this – the light, the wind, the uneven ground, the sounds of wild stuff – into the places we work. It's good for the soul, good for the mind, and, as it turns out, good for the work.

My original thesis for this essay warrants putting up front here, as it's what sent me on a research rabbit hole into whether nature in the office is any good for us.

I figured it was entirely plausible that a good deal of what ails the modern office comes down to the lighting. Not the strategy. Not the values statement. The tubes on the ceiling. Stay with me – we'll test it properly in a moment, because the truth is more interesting than the thesis, and it doesn't let the ceiling off the hook. Not entirely.

Biophilic design

Biophilic design is a catchy workplace trend, often completely misunderstood, resulting in well-meaning people sticking plants in the atrium, a living wall by reception, bright coloured soft materials in communal shared areas and a splash of green on the beanbag in the corner that nobody sits on.

That framing is harmless, and it misses the point entirely.

At its core, biophilic design isn't about decoration or styling, it's relational. It asks an equine, human and more interesting question: what happens to people when the places they work in resonate with them being human?

You see, we evolved in a kind of harmony with the natural world – light and shadow, texture, weather, rhythm, the turn of the seasons, local food. We were shaped by our surroundings for a very long time before anyone opened a laptop and discussed this quarter's results. Strip those natural elements out of a room and something subtle, but important, goes missing. Put a few of them back and something begins to return. It's not going to arrive instantly, nor with much noise and drama, but measurably it will start to come back: in attention, in mood, in the ease with which thinking happens. That quarterly results review suddenly becomes a little more interesting.

Our distinct lack of alliance to nature isn't only an office problem too. It's true of the co-working spaces, the home studio, the kitchen table we use to make calls from, the living room that's now doubling as a home office. Wherever you work, the room is already teaching, nudging and co-creating how to feel.

Which is really rather interesting if we play with this idea long enough: every room you work in is already shaping how you think – so you may as well be the one who chooses how that works.

Most workspaces were arranged without anyone asking that question at all, and instead relying on some form of nature to be present, i.e. the pot plant by the filing cabinet. That's not a failing, it's an opportunity, and a cheap one at that.

So – is it really the lighting?

Let's quickly test the thesis of everything being wrong because of the lighting.

Let's start with the tube itself. A conventional fluorescent light of the older kind doesn't shine steadily; it pulses, brightening and dimming around a hundred times a second as the mains alternates. In other words, it flickers. Most people will tell you they can't see it, and they're right. Our eyes will not detect it. The trouble is that "can't consciously see it" and "isn't affected by it" turn out to be two different things.

In 1989 the vision scientist Arnold Wilkins and colleagues ran a proper double-blind experiment across a set of offices, swapping the old magnetic ballasts – the bit that drives the tube – for high-frequency electronic ones that cut the flicker to almost nothing. Nobody could tell which was which by looking. Yet under the high-frequency lighting, headaches and eyestrain fell by more than half. People even chose to leave those lights switched on for longer, without knowing why (Wilkins et al., 1989).

A later Swedish study found the actual tell in the brain: under the flickering tubes, an arousal marker in people's EEG shifted, and those most sensitive to flicker were the most affected (Küller & Laike, 1998). The light was, in a very real sense, vibrating at people. How interesting. And, a surprising number of people, well, their heads, noticed even when eyes didn't.

So the original thesis has something to it but wasn't quite correct. The villain isn't "fluorescent light" as a category, even though I kind of wished it did. It's the flicker, and specifically the flicker of old fittings. Most tubes installed since the early 2000s already run on high-frequency ballasts, and most LEDs remove the problem too.

Ok, so what about those posh "full-spectrum" bulbs that promise to mimic daylight? Well, don't rush out to buy those either: a thorough review found no convincing evidence they do anything special for health or mood (McColl & Veitch, 2001).

And even the much-maligned cool, bluish light that the health gurus tell you to avoid isn't all bad. During the working day, brighter, blue-enriched light has been shown to improve alertness and even self-reported sleep (Viola et al., 2008). The problem with that light is timing, not general evilness: wonderful at eleven in the morning, unhelpful at eleven at night. And, given so many people often work later with blue lighting, there's a very real chance they are indeed affecting your sleep.

The good news hiding here is free, cheap but sadly does run out around the evening; daylight. Daylight, through a window, falling on a real person is magnificent for us humans. A small case-control study of office workers found that those with windows got dramatically more daylight, slept on average around three-quarters of an hour longer each night, and scored better on vitality than their windowless colleagues (Boubekri et al., 2014).

It's a pilot though, not proven – but the direction is echoed everywhere the question gets asked. The sun is, so far, still free. Until the tech giants get hold of it.

The weak signals

I first started paying attention to all this not in a lab but on a video call.

When teams I led shifted to working from home a couple of days a week – and later, when the whole world did it at once – I noticed something creeping into the backgrounds. A pot plant appears behind someone's shoulder. The following week, two. A month on, a small jungle, a shelf of books, a wooden desk, the light visibly repositioned so it fell on a face rather than behind it.

These were weak signals – subtle tells and observations of individuals rebalancing, until everyone was doing it. People reaching, possibly without thinking too much about it, to put a little nature back into their lives, their rooms. And then the same signals started travelling back into the office: bamboo laptop risers, natural fabrics, someone asking to turn off half the overhead lights, people bringing their own plants into the office, more natural materials being used for storage. A correction, often led not by policy but by instinct and people's desire to reclaim a little nature near them.

I've come to think weak signals are one of the most useful things a person who pays attention can learn to read (it's a habit I've written about before, in the art of noticing, and Berlin city walk). Weak signals are little clues that tell you where a system is under strain, and where people are already trying to mend it – often long before anyone in charge has registered there's a problem. A room full of smuggled-in houseplants is a weak signal telling you something. It's worth listening.

The sustainability mix-up

We should also not confuse biophilic design with sustainability; they often get conflated. The two overlap, but are not the same thing. Sustainability is about the planet and looking after it. Biophilic design is about the human experience of a place, with nature within it. A solar panel helps the environment. A window helps a person. A green roof only becomes biophilic at the moment someone can see it, walk on it, or sit among it. Of course, health and safety plays a role, and rightly so, when green roofs go straight onto flat roofs nobody is ever allowed up onto. That's a fine thing to do for the planet. It just does nothing for the person at the desk two floors below, because they'll never know it's there.

The best spaces hold both in mind. They don't only account for energy and natural resources; they reduce the small, constant psychological friction of being somewhere that ignores you and what you need – they make it easier to feel settled, focused and present. Where a workplace overlooks that, people find their own workarounds: more breaks, more tiredness and more disengagement that every manager recognises and few connect to the actual space it's happening in.

What this looks like in practice

Here's the wonderfully cheering part. The changes that matter run from the significant to the almost stupidly small, and most of them cost very little.

Natural light is the big one, and the most overlooked.

Where you can, sit so the daylight comes toward you, over the top of your screen, rather than from behind – which, as a bonus, stops you appearing on video calls as a silhouette from a horror movie. Choose the window over the overhead panel. If real daylight genuinely isn't available, a daylight lamp through the winter is a good stand-in, I use one and it's magical.

The evidence linking light exposure to mood and sleep is one of the stronger threads in all of this. Of everything here, this is the change most likely to move how you feel by the weekend.

Plants — the real kind.

Even hardy, forgiving specimens, the sort that survive being in my studio are fantastic: field experiments that added plants to real offices found gains in concentration, satisfaction and even measured output (Nieuwenhuis et al., 2014).

The tempting shortcut, especially in tech leaning companies, is the screen – a forest wallpaper, a nature background on the call, a wall of digital landscapes. And let's be clear here, they do work, just maybe not as well as the real thing. In lab tests even nature photographs have nudged people's attention back (Berman et al., 2008). But the evidence that a screensaver does what a living thing on the desk reliably does is thin and mixed and likely unreliable. So if you've a tenner and a windowsill, spend it on something that grows. And then look after it, unlike me.

Natural materials.

Wood, stone, natural fabric in place of moulded plastic, or synthetic materials. A wooden desk surface, a bamboo riser, a fabric chair instead of the plastic one. My grandfather was a cabinet maker – I spent hours as a boy in the shed at the bottom of his garden turning what had been a tree into something that would outlast us both – so I'll admit I am bias. But the tactile grounding, feel and connection is real. Those seemingly small material choices accumulate into a room that simply feels different to be in, and with less off-gassing to boot.

Acoustics, which workplaces underrate almost universally.

The open-plan office is an insult to good work. It was built on the rather cheerful assumption that noise equals collaboration, and collaboration equals productivity. Mostly it equals distraction, which is why so many people in open-plan offices spend the day wearing headphones – a whole team building private booths out of plastic and foam and Spotify because the building didn't create working spaces for them.

Soft furnishings, books on shelves, curtains, fabric hangings all absorb the sound that would otherwise bounce and pile up and rattle through the office. And my word, we've all worked with that one person who cannot help but shout on every single call. If possible have a room set aside for quiet, focused, deep work – with the open space treated as the exception you visit to collaborate, rather than the default you're sentenced to all day.

Colour, which shapes mood more than we may think.

Cooler, darker tones tend toward calm and focus; warmer, brighter ones toward energy, abundance and lift. The exact response is personal – I painted my own north-facing studio a cautious off-white on everyone's advice and have regretted the gloom of it ever since; this is the year it finally goes yellow, because yellow makes me feel like the sun's out even when it very much isn't. Worth noticing, at least, what the colours around you are doing to your energy across a day.

A moment in a field

I recorded the audio version of this piece walking outdoors. There's something magical, and technically tricky though, about the wind rustling through the barley, the uneven ground underfoot, birdsongs and noises that barely repeat. Nothing about it was efficient. And within a few minutes my thinking had loosened and cleared. I felt calm. I felt connected. I still, of course, felt self-conscious.

That isn't a sentimental aside. It's this whole piece in miniature. Science has a name for the mechanism – attention restoration, the idea that natural settings let a tired, over-directed mind recover (Kaplan, 1995).

You don't need a forest to bathe in to get a dose of it: in one study, a forty-second glance at a flowering green roof was enough to measurably steady people's attention on a demanding task (Lee et al., 2015). Forty seconds. There's a habit to try.

Back at a desk, the same principle applies in small beautiful ways too. A wooden surface. A living plant. Light that changes through the day. These are cues to a nervous system that it's safe to settle and think. That isn't soft at all. It's physiological, and it's been physiological since long before any of us had a job or worried about the quarterly results.

Work doesn't happen in the abstract. We're not plugged into the matrix, yet. It happens in rooms, at tables, in cafes, in kitchens, in buildings that shape how people behave long before any leadership culture deck gets sent round, or values posters gets stuck up outside the lifts. The most famous study in this whole field is an old, but important one, from 1984: surgical patients whose window looked onto trees rather than a brick wall recovered faster and needed less strong pain relief (Ulrich, 1984). A view did that. Imagine what a designed-for-humans building might do to our daily lives.

When a space is harsh, dusty, dark, musty, falling apart, filled with fake materials, people tend to harden to match it. When it's sterile, they lose focus. When it's made with some care – daylight, living things, materials that connect to the natural world – people are calmer, and tend to think more clearly and generously. The question worth playing with is the same one the Work Makes Us essay asks from another angle: does this environment give something to the people inside it, or take from them?

So look around wherever it is you work. Not critically or with judgement, but instead with a deep sense of curiosity. What does the space encourage? What does it drain or take away? The most worthwhile changes are rarely grand redesigns with a budget line, a complex spreadsheet, a steering committee, and Kevin McCloud. They're small acts of noticing. Opening a blind. Turning a desk to face the light. Switching off the flickering lights. Swapping blue lights for red lights. Letting something living share the room.

Work should never feel like exile from the natural world. We designed this exile over time, one sensible decision at a time. We can let the outside back in the same way.

Quick reference – bringing nature into your workspace

Many of these cost very little, and some of it nothing at all.

Natural light — start here. Face the light rather than sit with it behind you; choose windows over overhead panels where you can. A daylight lamp is a good winter stand-in. It's the single change most likely to shift how you feel.

Real plants. Hardy, low-maintenance varieties are plenty. A living thing in the room does what a photo of one doesn't reliably manage.

Natural materials. Wood, stone and fabric over plastic where possible – a wooden surface, a bamboo riser, a fabric chair. Small differences that add up.

Acoustics. Soft furnishings, books, fabric and curtains absorb sound. Give deep work a quiet space, and make the open, sociable area the exception rather than the default.

Colour. Warmer tones lift; cooler tones calm. The response is personal – notice what yours is doing to your energy across the day.

Mind the flicker. If overhead lighting gives you headaches, suspect old flickering fittings before you blame yourself; newer high-frequency or LED lighting, and a lamp of your own, often help. Skip the "full-spectrum" marketing – the evidence for it is weak.

A dose of the actual outdoors. A short walk, a coffee in the morning sun, ten minutes in a park. Brief exposure works, and it works quickly – a matter of minutes, not hours.

The sustainability distinction. Biophilic design isn't the same as sustainability. A green roof nobody can see or sit on helps the planet but not the person. Here, the human experience of the space is the point.

Bibliography

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