Subjective Impression of an Office with Biophilic Design and Blue Lighting: A Pilot Study

This paper investigates and compares people’s subjective impression of an office with a biophilic design and blue lighting. Existing studies have examined their influence on perception separately, but how they compare is unclear. Additionally, only a few studies have used an office setting as a case study. To address this research gap, this study collected people’s ratings and rankings of four simulated interior scenes of a private office using an online survey. The scenes include blue lighting, a biophilic design with daylight and view, a biophilic design with indoor plants, and a non-biophilic baseline with conventional white lighting. A total of 284 complete responses were collected and analyzed using a mixed-effect model. It was found that the two biophilic designs improved people’s perception of the office compared to the base case. The biophilic design with access to daylight and view outperformed the space with indoor plants in all the examined perceptual categories, specifically how the office space was perceived by participants as brighter, more comfortable, and spacious. On the contrary, the space with blue lighting decreased people’s ratings in most perceptual attributes in comparison to the baseline. The negative influence was notably significant in how lively, comfortable, bright, and appealing the space was perceived as being by participants. Subjects’ preference rankings of the four simulated office spaces showed a similar pattern.