Designing better spaces for people

The relevance of design for mental health -or for behavior altogether- has been historically overlooked in psychology. The field of environmental psychology has tried for the last 40 years to present design and all other environmental variables as integral aspects of behavior production, behavioral change, and, at a higher level, in the reproduction of social structure (via behavioral patterns.)
The article below by Roger Ulrich, elegantly shows how field research can be used to highlight environmental characteristics (he calls them architectural features) of spaces and their interaction with behavior to produced desired outcomes. In the study he describes, he shows how psychiatric care facilities can be designed to reduce stress and therefore violent incidents.
There is a solid body of literature in environmental psychology that documents how people react to different environments. It is about time that we psychologists team up with architects and other relevant thinkers (educators, public health researchers, urban planners, etc) to create better spaces for people.
Dear colleagues, let's "step out of our heads" for a minute...

Designing for Calm:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/opinion/sunday/building-a-space-for-calm.html?_r=0