therapeutic aspects of space

I am thinking a lot about space right now. I am especially interested, in my own practice, in the interaction between the therapy we are doing and the PLACE in which that therapy happens. For too long, it seems that practitioners engaged in communication therapy have disregarded the therapeutic value of the actual physical environment.

The impact of light, color, texture, sensory input, lack of sensory input, noise and smell have been relegated to the end of the list of considerations, with far more emphasis placed on the fine grained aspects of the intervention.

I am finding an enormous amount of inspiration from experiments my colleagues and I are doing at Under the Umbrella to investigate how change in communication is influenced by an attention to the physical environment. We are looking at light (both natural and artificial), color (enhancing those colors inspired by nature and the natural world), softness (countering a long held notion that learning happens best in a “hard-scape”), sound (using perspective taking as a way to manage noise volume in the space) and smell (exploring scent as a regulating tool for therapy).

This will be an ongoing area of clinical research and experimentation. Reports on outcomes here at our space (along with other ruminations of therapy and intervention) will be the subject of future posts. Stay tuned.