We recently connected with Susie Frazier and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Susie, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

When I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult at 47, my lifelong hypersensitivity to interior settings suddenly made sense. Cold spaces devoid of nature, with too many lights, hard surfaces, and competing acoustic sounds have been life-long challenges, and I’ve always searched for ways to have personal control over my sensory experience whenever possible. After learning many of my innate coping practices involving nature were backed by research happening around the world, it occurred to me that sharing these methods might be helpful to others who have ever felt uncomfortable inside a workplace or a home of their own, whether they had any formal diagnosis or not. In 2018, I shared my story and philosophies in a self-published book called, Designing For Wellness.

As vulnerable as it has felt to raise awareness about conditions that most people didn’t notice until the pandemic hit, it has been very encouraging to see so many business leaders and trusted organizations like WHO now stating that design plays a very large role in human health and well-being. Over the decades, I’ve used my various art forms and talents to raise awareness for the sustainability movement and fostering a healthy planet. It feels great to see that now includes the wellness movement and fostering healthy people. So many factors of a building affect whether anyone feels good when they’re inside it. That’s what drew me to the Internatlional WELL Building Institute (WELL) and the WELL Building Standard. I wanted to learn how every design choice involving air, water, food, light, acoustics, temperature, movement, materials, nature, art, mental health and community were affecting people inside buildings.

I figured the more I knew about the world’s best practices in design, the more helpful I could be to my clients.

Now, I’m involved as a WELL Faculty member and a WELL AP, coming up to speed on the latest research around designing for neurodiversity, or the natural variety of sensory thresholds that exist in the human population. Turns out we’re seeing significant value in the discovery that all human brains are neurodivergent from each other, just like the human fingerprint. If people are provided with design solutions that allow them to adjust the light, temperature, sound and other conditions of a setting to meet their unique sensory needs, we are now designing for the well-being of everyone.

With that data point, it feels like a new day for design.

Susie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a biophilic artist and design consultant who helps development teams create places people are inspired to be. With a sensory fluency of the built environment and expertise in wellness design, I work with development professionals, and their architects, to solve some of their biggest challenges relating to attraction and retention of their audience. Whether their concerns focus on a hybrid workforce of professionals, prospective multifamily tenants, or an entire neighborhood of stakeholders, I inspire developers to find meaning in their site and implement well-being features that appeal to everyone who will touch it.

I started as an ecology artist in 1997 making furniture and home decor out of reclaimed construction materials. Back then my functional objects made from salvaged roofing slates and discarded lumber invited a lot of questions like: What do you mean it’s recycled? What is going green? I’ve never heard of green building; What is sustainability? Coming up through the environmental movement, I could logically understand the impact buildings had our planet. But an ADHD diagnosis six years ago led me to more deeply feel the impact buildings had on my being. Since then, I’ve been creating design solutions for clients inspired by the balancing sensations and organic patterns I see and touch in the natural world. Contact with living and representational nature is now widely documented to be an effective design strategy for decreasing people’s levels of depression and anxiety and increasing their capacity to recover from all types of stress. That’s why sometimes I’m asked to dream up site-specific biophilic art installations. Other times, I’m asked to lay my creative thinking over an entire project, which invites new ways of collaborating that deliver media-worthy results.

Today, I support all types of commercial clients through roles as a wellness design speaker, WELL consultant, or wellness spokesperson. I have been fortunate to work with kindred souls in multifamily development, commercial design, construction materials, and city planning who understood my value extended beyond any piece of art or infrastructure I may have designed. What I provide is a unifying vision for sensory well-being, as experienced through many aspects of the built environment, which opens pathways for distinctive design elements and new marketing vernacular that help define and differentiate my client’s projects in the marketplace.

In the past, I’ve worked with economic development leaders and architects on nature-inspired elements embedded into streetscapes, transit environments and interior model suites. But with a mind for seeing the broader ecosystem, I was recently asked to serve as a wellness design consultant for a $310 million development project in Jersey City, NJ, which included a 50-story tower with 810 rental apartments, 41 units of affordable housing, and 14,000 square feet of retail space. All of that was adjacent to a 50,000-square-foot public elementary school next to a Filipino cultural garden with a dog park. I worked as a member of that 22-person design team, intersecting with different practice areas like interiors, landscape and engineering to explore ways we could re-imagine design features to more meaningfully support the well-being of the future users of the property. I think it’s fair to say everyone on the team understood our efforts were going to significantly improve the quality of life for many people in that community, which is ultimately why I feel passionate about working in this field.

Americans now spend 90% of their time indoors. If we are not designing buildings more consciously with that statistic in mind, we are missing enormous opportunities to create healthier, more attractive and biodiverse places where people naturally want to be.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

Luckily we live in a time in which there’s lots of research to help us confirm what we think we know and to debunk what we thought we knew because now we have new information. After five decades of trying to solve the mysteries of my mind with the help of the brightest minds I knew, the models coming out of WELL seem to be the closest thing to truth I’ve found.

Sure, I wish the world’s knowledge-base on healthy buildings and healthy people existed in one place when I was emerging as an artist and design professional. It took a long time for a credible body of scientists, architects, engineers and business leaders to speak a universal message about neurodiversity as a natural part of biodiversity. But we all start wherever we are, with our own unique set of conditions. The art of anyone’s journey, no matter what package we arrived in, is to look at the landscape before us (and the ever-changing conditions within it) as a curriculum for learning and opportunities to act. I don’t move the same way on everything, but I’m constantly growing.

It’s the only way I know how to do my best work in the world.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Because of my personal story, I’m driven by a vision of buildings as beacons of well-being. From my vantage point, the first task of anyone who owns or manages a property is to consider if their spaces actually feel welcoming and pleasing to their people – as if those space were designed with everyone’s needs in mind. That’s what the International WELL Building Institute means when it says we’re designing people-first places and people-first culture.

At this stage of the movement, it’s all about designing for inclusivity and flexibility due to an increasingly neurodivergent population of workers and residents who have a wide range of sensory thresholds. And that’s a topic that attending design professionals from around the world will hear about at the upcoming WELL Summit taking place in Washington D.C. on September 25th and 26th at Union Market. For me, designing for wellness has felt less like a mission for social good and more like essential wisdom for survival. Whatever it is, I’m grateful to be learning more from today’s global authority on transforming health and well-being in buildings, organizations, and communities.      

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.susiefrazier.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/susiefrazier/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/susie.frazier.cleveland
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susie-frazier/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@susiefrazierofficial

Image Credits
SusieFrazier2.jpg was shot by Keith Rock of Andy Rock Fine Art Services.