When talking about designing for health, we tend to think of interventions aimed at rectifying people’s lives. There’s an air of sainthood and the smell of disinfectant to it. These interventions come to us in slightly patronizing tones, sold by gorgeous people in lab coats with perfect teeth. But health can be much more than hospitals, and design much more humane.

I am not a health expert, although both my parents were. In fact, as a landscape architect, I would probably be much more comfortable writing a column for the ‘Living Environment’ theme. But why are these two separated, when we know how much of our health depends on the environments in which we live? This column attempts to build a bridge between the two.

Good design, for me, is invisible. It slots right into our lives, meets us where we are, and walks alongside us. It is neither paternalistic nor preachy. It is accepting and empathetic. It understands human nature without trying to correct it.

This requires us to understand health as something broader than an individual condition – more than the absence of disease. Health is in the air we breathe and the ground on which we walk. It is shaped by the people we encounter, the places we can reach and the opportunities that present themselves as so many treats as we go about our day. There is a considerable distance to bridge between the science of prescriptions and guidelines (you should walk however many minutes a day it is now) and the reality of living in a city where walking is difficult, unpleasant or unsafe. Design can make healthier behaviours easier without turning them into obligations, complete with sermons and targets. The Netherlands is living proof of this: nobody here cycles because they were told to be healthy. They cycle because the way the infrastructure is designed makes it the easiest thing to do.

Many of the projects presented this year under the theme Health & Wellbeing involve some form of tracking: How focused are you? How much are you moving? How much personal information are you willing to share? Such interventions could be enormously useful, particularly when they create greater self-awareness, encouraging people to ask themselves not simply how healthy am I? but how healthy do I feel? Yet their value also depends on whether they can bridge the gap between measurements and lived experience.

I particularly appreciate the OverDeTop interactive staircase for this reason. It seems a great illustration of making movement the conduit and not the goal. It reminds me of the best playgrounds, which are often the simplest: almost blank canvases of shapes, vegetation and topography onto which children can project their own imagination. Particularly effective when using natural materials, they allow children to return to something more primal. Their play needs no monitoring and the health benefits gained need no congratulations. Of course, because we live in the digital age, OverDeTop adds an audiovisual experience to the movement itself. But the principle remains appealing: rather than instructing us to move, it gives us a reason to want to.

The ecological psychologist James Gibson called such invitations to movement ‘affordances’: what an environment offers the animal. We do not decide that a low wall is for sitting or a slope is for rolling down; we perceive it, and move, before we have thought about it. This is why the best design for health goes unnoticed: it’s a call to the wilderness within us, rather than to the part of us that reads guidelines. For all our attempts to measure, optimise and correct ourselves, human beings remain wonderfully unruly. We are embodied, social animals. We are motivated by pleasure and curiosity, by other people, by what feels safe or beautiful or interesting, and sometimes simply by what happens to be in front of us. Designing for health should not mean designing that wilderness out of us. It should mean understanding the human experience well enough to speak directly to it.

The emerging paradigm of One Health has given us a language for recognising that human health cannot ultimately be separated from the health of animals, ecosystems and the environments we share. We do not need to subscribe wholly to the framework to recognise the fundamental point: our health does not stop at the boundary of our bodies. And it does not solely take place in hospitals.

Which also raises the question: if our living environment has an impact on our health and healthcare systems, what is the impact of our healthcare on our living environment? Virtually every project presented at the Dutch Design Week has a non-negligible environmental cost. Sensors require materials. Data needs storage space. AI requires computing power and vast amounts of water. What environment is created when health considerations are confined to ever more powerful and more energy-hungry hospitals? A design that improves one measure of human health while degrading the environmental systems on which that health ultimately depends is not resolving a problem so much as moving it elsewhere.

These are not arguments against technology or healthcare, but rather for designing across boundaries. In my view, the best design for health may not look like healthcare at all. It might look like a street you want to walk down, a mature tree providing shade and a structure to climb, a well-placed bench to spontaneously stop and chat with your neighbours, or a staircase you take simply because it looks more interesting than the lift. It is a bridge between us and the world, all the way back to the wilderness within.