ABSTRACT
The field of design and health emerged to study the effects of the built environment and to recommend ways to promote wellness through architecture. With the unfortunate growth of lifestyle diseases, it has acquired a practical urgency even though it has yet to have a wider impact. The user is in fact an active rather than passive agent and participates in shaping his experience and his response to the architecture he encounters. By using ideas from economics and psychology that deal with how people make choices, the authors build a framework that provides a way to understand architecture and how it affects health. This framework is developed in detail and some of the basic concepts of choice theory, a basic framework of ideas in economics, are introduced and related to architectural meaning. According to Kahneman, slow deliberation generally results in rational choices whereas fast intuitive thinking sometimes results in irrational choices.
