Joy: The Ultimate Measure of Interior Design

A new professional standard for vitality, consciousness and human sustainability: In architecture and interior design, we constantly talk about sustainability, well-being and quality. Yet we avoid the most decisive question:

Why do our interiors not create more joy?

We live at a time when a reflection paper emerging from a dialogue convened by the United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA, concludes that sustainable development requires a spiritual transformation of people and organisations.

This is not a binding UN requirement for architecture and interior design. It is a far more disruptive invitation to understand sustainability as something greater than the technical management of materials, energy and CO₂.

Read Enhancing Human Flourishing Within the 2030 Development Agenda: The Spirituality of Global Transformation.

Yet the industry often maintains a measurement-fixated approach that primarily addresses external parameters:

• light
• air
• materials
• temperature
• acoustics
• energy consumption

All of these must be measured. But they are not enough.

Measurements do not necessarily tell us whether a person feels alive within a space.

An interior can be technically correct and humanly dead. It can be functional and still feel empty. It can be certified and yet devoid of joy, meaning or connection with the person who is to live within it.

This article therefore positions joy as the ultimate measure of interior design.

Not as a promise of happiness.

Not as a fully established scientific unit.

But as the uncompromising professional test:

Does this interior make life larger or smaller for the person who is to live within it?

Interior Design as an Active Participant in Human Transformation

Modern sustainability discourse overlooks a simple truth:

Human beings cannot create regenerative systems when their inner capacity is constantly overloaded.

Psychological waste, trauma, projections, emotional blockages and unconscious patterns do not disappear simply because a building receives a good certification.

In Et essay om indre frihed, Jes Bertelsen connects the fragile condition of the world with the need for greater consciousness, empathy, heartfelt presence and inner contemplation. His work suggests that we cannot establish a better external world without also engaging with human inner development. Bibliotek.dk, Gyldendal.

In Vækst og bæredygtighed, Steen Hildebrandt challenges a one-sided, short-term and economic concept of growth. He connects growth with quality of life, consciousness, human presence, collaboration and empathy. Bog & idé, Steen Hildebrandt.

This is the expansion that the interior design profession must take seriously.

The interior is not neutral within the process of human development. It affects us individually through:

• cleanliness
• beauty
• colour
• form
• materials
• sound
• light
• scent
• tactility
• symbols
• atmosphere

Interior design cannot treat trauma or mental illness. But it can maintain, reinforce, challenge or reorganise the physical framework within which everyday human patterns unfold.

It is therefore no longer sufficient to design functional spaces. Interior design must be capable of contributing actively to transformation, not by saving the human being, but by creating a more conscious framework for new actions, experiences and meanings.

Psychological Waste Becomes Visible Within the Space

Blissbode uses psychological waste to describe inner and relational patterns that leave visible or experienced traces within the environment.

These may appear as:

• accumulation
• stagnation
• lack of maintenance
• rooms that are never used
• objects belonging to a former identity
• interiors based on other people’s expectations
• excessive control
• resignation
• recurring conflicts between people and functions

Psychological waste is not a clinical diagnosis or a physical substance.

But neither is it nothing.

It can be read in what we keep, repeat, avoid and organise around ourselves.

Interior design cannot dissolve a person’s trauma. But a conscious design process can help to reveal and transform some of the environmental traces that maintain an old pattern.

It can ask:

• What is this room holding on to?
• Which identity does the interior repeat?
• What has become normal even though it is no longer life-giving?
• What has not been given space?
• Which future cannot yet take place here?

This is where the interior becomes an active participant.

The Bastian Model: How an Interior Comes into Being

If interior design is to contribute actively to human transformation, it requires a professional understanding of how inner and outer processes are connected.

The Bastian Model is therefore introduced as a visualisation of the conscious creative process connecting the designer’s intention with the resident’s experience.

The model is a further development of Peter Bastian’s work with music, sensory experience and consciousness, which has also been communicated in relation to Tor Nørretranders’s Mærk Verden.

Peter Bastian worked with musicality as a key to understanding human consciousness, including the capacity to experience diversity as a coherent whole. Information, Mofibo.

Tor Nørretranders’s Mærk Verden connects scientific investigations of consciousness and information with the human being’s concrete experience of the world. Google Books.

Within the Blissbode context, this is translated into architectural and interior design practice.

The Designer’s Path

Spirit → inspiration → idea → feeling → structure → materialisation

An interior does not begin in the material.

It begins in something that does not yet have physical form.

A sensation.

A movement.

A longing.

An idea of a life that cannot yet unfold within the existing environment.

The designer’s process moves from the immaterial towards the material:

• Spirit becomes inspiration.
• Inspiration becomes an idea.
• The idea becomes feeling and interpretation.
• Feeling becomes structure.
• Structure becomes materiality.
• Materiality becomes interior.

The Spatial User’s Path

Sensing → perception → atmosphere → feeling → structure → transcendence → joy

The user encounters the process from the opposite direction.

The user encounters:

• the material
• the light
• the sound
• the temperature
• the colour
• the form
• the scent
• the tactility
• the atmosphere

These sensory encounters are interpreted.

The interpretation may influence feeling, attention and action.

In some environments, the process ends with function. In others, the environment opens towards something greater than its immediate function:

• contemplation
• coherence
• meaning
• transcendence
• joy

Transcendence is used here as a philosophical and experiential concept. It describes moments in which a person experiences being lifted beyond a fixed or purely instrumental relationship with the space.

It is not a guaranteed effect.

It is a possible space of experience.

A Double Spiral Between Human Being and Space

The Bastian Model shows how an interior comes into being through a conscious creative process.

It makes visible that interior design is not only a physical discipline.

It is also a discipline of consciousness.

The designer’s inner process and the resident’s inner experience are connected through:

• resonance
• sensing
• perception
• atmosphere
• emotional response
• the creation of meaning

This does not mean that the designer’s intention automatically produces a particular experience.

The user is not an empty vessel.

Experience is also shaped by:

• culture
• stage of life
• sensory profile
• neurodiversity
• personal history
• social relationships
• present needs
• personal associations

The interior is therefore only completed in the meeting between the designer’s creation and the user’s lived experience.

Design becomes experience.

Experience becomes action.

Action becomes quality of life.

The Vedas, Theory U and TCM

The Bastian Model does not stand alone.

It belongs to a broader field of intellectual history and practice in which inner and outer processes are understood as interconnected.

The Vedic understanding of consciousness, Otto Scharmer’s Presencing Model and Theory U, together with systemic perspectives from Traditional Chinese Medicine, point from different traditions towards the understanding that the human being cannot be reduced to an isolated mechanical unit.

Theory U combines systems thinking, innovation, change leadership and practices of attention. The approach works with sensing the system, suspending habitual assumptions and translating emerging possibilities into prototypes and action.

TCM and the Vedas belong to historical philosophical and medical traditions. They can provide interpretative frameworks and practical experience, but should not automatically be treated as evidence of modern physiological or architectural effects.

Within Blissbode’s practice, these traditions are used as:

• foundations in intellectual history
• systemic inspiration
• symbolic interpretative frameworks
• practice-based understandings of the human being
• points of departure for new research questions

Interior design becomes regenerative when it works with both the visible and the immaterial without confusing philosophical inspiration with conclusive scientific documentation.

The Zohar/Hawkins Model: From Creation to Effect

The Bastian Model describes the process behind the creation of a conscious interior.

But if the interior profession is to move from conscious creation towards conscious effect, we must also investigate how people experience beauty, complexity and atmosphere.

This is where the Zohar/Hawkins Model is introduced.

The model is inspired by Danah Zohar’s work with quantum aesthetics and David R. Hawkins’s logarithmic scale of consciousness.

Danah Zohar has applied the language and principles of quantum physics to develop an understanding of human consciousness, psychology and social organisations. Her book The Quantum Self includes a distinct strand concerning quantum aesthetics. Danah Zohar, The Quantum Self, Internet Archive.

David R. Hawkins’s Map of Consciousness organises emotions, values and experienced states of consciousness on a logarithmic scale. The model was developed through Hawkins’s own theory and use of muscle testing. Veritas Publishing, Google Books.

The Hawkins scale is not an established clinical or scientifically validated method for measuring the objective consciousness level of people or interiors.

Within Blissbode’s work, it is therefore used as:

• an inspirational model
• a framework for reflection
• a practice-based observational tool
• a point of departure for investigating experienced energy, atmosphere and joy

This makes the model relevant.

The Blue Markers: Complexity as a Lever

Within Blissbode’s Zohar/Hawkins Model, the blue markers function as levers.

They show how the complexity of an interior can be moved through:

• form
• structure
• colour
• materiality
• rhythm
• contrast
• variation
• symbolic meaning
• representations of nature

The markers illustrate that an interior does not become joyful simply by adding more.

Too little complexity may create stagnation. Too much complexity may create overload.

The professional task is to find the level at which the environment does not merely match the user’s present state, but offers a controlled invitation towards expansion.

The Interior’s Energy Slightly Above the User’s Level

A central idea within Blissbode’s practice is that joy may arise when the perceived energy of the interior is positioned slightly above the user’s current level.

Not so far above that the environment becomes alienating, demanding or overwhelming.

Not so far below that it confirms stagnation, resignation or depletion.

But slightly above.

As an invitation.

As an environmental pull forwards.

As a sensory reminder of a capacity that the person may not yet be living fully.

This does not mean that the energy of an interior can currently be measured as a universal physical quantity.

The concept describes a practice-based hypothesis concerning the relationship between:

• the user’s experienced state
• the intensity of the environment
• sensory complexity
• personal meaning
• the possibility of development

The hypothesis is central to Blissbode’s method.

It must be investigated.

Joy Is Not Random

The model shows that atmospheres of joy do not need to be treated as subjective accidents.

Joy remains personally and culturally experienced.

But this does not mean that the profession cannot investigate it.

We can examine:

• which places people choose to inhabit
• which environments they return to
• where they invite others
• where creative activity emerges
• which materials and colours are experienced as life-giving
• when complexity becomes inspiring
• when it becomes overwhelming
• how experience changes following an intervention

Joy is therefore scalable as a field of professional investigation.

Not necessarily as a single numerical answer, but as a quality that can be:

• described
• registered
• compared
• designed for
• evaluated
• researched

From Dogmatic Objectivity to Conscious Presence

The industry has historically been bound to objectivity, measurements and standards.

This has created professionalism.

But it has also created blindness.

The new paradigm does not require us to abandon measurement. It requires us to stop confusing what is measurable with what is meaningful.

Light, air, temperature and acoustics are fundamental.

DGNB Heart is a distinction for health and well-being that may be awarded to DGNB-certified buildings. The scheme recognises buildings that make an additional effort to support users’ well-being. DGNB Heart publication.

But lux levels do not tell us whether light is experienced as alive.

Decibels do not tell us whether a room feels intimate.

Temperature does not tell us whether a person feels at home.

The new professional discipline must therefore be able to work with both layers:

The physical must be measured. The experienced must be investigated.

Nature, art, embodied practices and sensory observation open towards a deeper understanding of how spaces encounter human inner systems.

This is not a rejection of science.

It is a protest against a professional discipline that accepts only what its present instruments are already capable of registering.

Empathic Interior Design as a Professional Discipline

Interior design must include empathy as a professional capacity.

This does not mean that the designer should guess the user’s feelings or act as a therapist.

It means that the designer must be able to:

• listen without immediately trying to solve
• observe without diagnosing
• understand different sensory needs
• work with personal and cultural preferences
• recognise conflicts between space, function and user
• investigate the atmosphere of the place
• test personal assumptions
• accept that professional taste is not universal

Empathy is not a soft addition to professional practice.

It is the capacity that makes it possible to understand who the space is actually for.

Initiatives and movements such as Inner Development Goals, LOHAS, Earthships, tiny-house living, DGNB Heart and the Institute of Noetic Sciences demonstrate, from different positions, a growing interest in the relationship between human capacity, health, sustainability, environment and consciousness.

They do not document one shared theory.

They demonstrate a movement that the interior profession can no longer ignore.

Inner Development Goals

Inner Development Goals provide a shared language for 25 human capacities organised within Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating and Acting.

The guide connects inner development with the possibility of lasting systemic transformation.

IDG is not a certification for interior design.

But the framework supports Blissbode’s central thesis:

External transformation is insufficient without the development of human inner capacity.

LOHAS

LOHAS stands for Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability.

The concept describes a lifestyle in which personal health and well-being are connected with environmental and social sustainability.

A research article from 2021 developed and tested a scale for examining LOHAS as a multidimensional lifestyle concept, while also observing that discussion of LOHAS had long developed ahead of its empirical documentation. Read the research article.

LOHAS demonstrates that the relationship between quality of life, consumption, health and sustainability is already influencing markets and lifestyles.

The interior profession must understand this connection without reducing it to another sales style.

Earthships

Earthship Biotecture works with buildings integrating solar energy, rainwater and snow collection, thermal mass, reused materials, water treatment and indoor food production.

Earthships do not constitute evidence for consciousness-based interior design.

They are a concrete example of how the building can be reimagined as a more integrated system connecting:

• people
• resources
• energy
• water
• waste
• food
• surroundings

Tiny-House Living

The tiny-house movement connects smaller living spaces with simplification, reduction and a desire to live with less.

The movement also contains practical challenges concerning storage, legislation and function. Wikipedia, The Tiny Life.

Tiny-house living is relevant because it challenges the industry’s automatic association between:

• more space
• greater consumption
• higher status
• a better life

A smaller environment is not automatically better.

But the movement asks a necessary question:

How much space does a living life actually require?

The Five-Point Model of Vækstcenteret

The pedagogical model of Vækstcenteret is known as the Five-Point Model, the pentagram or the star of empathy.

The model was developed by Jes Bertelsen and is based on five natural capacities:

• breathing
• the ability to sense the body
• spontaneous creativity
• attention
• awareness of emotions reflected in the heart area

The model connects inner training with deeper, kinder and more precise communication with others. Read about the Five-Point Model.

The model was not developed as an interior design framework.

But it offers a relevant understanding of human capacity that can inspire a more sensory and empathic design process.

Institute of Noetic Sciences

The Institute of Noetic Sciences is a non-profit research centre and laboratory working at the intersection of science and profound human experience.

The institute was founded in 1973 by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell.

IONS investigates consciousness, human experience and possible connections between inner and outer reality.

Several research areas exist at or beyond the boundaries of established scientific consensus and should be approached with the same critical attention as other frontier fields.

IONS is relevant to Blissbode because the institute maintains that difficult questions concerning consciousness can be investigated.

Not because all the questions have already been resolved.

IASK and Kinesiology

The International Association of Specialized Kinesiologists describes itself as a global community for schools, national organisations and practitioners within specialised kinesiology.

Kinesiology is used within parts of Blissbode’s historical methodological framework as a practice-based or complementary tool.

It should not be presented as an established scientific method for objectively measuring:

• an interior’s level of consciousness
• unknown energy fields
• health effects
• universal truths

Where kinesiology is used, it functions as a complementary interpretative or practice-based tool.

Expanded Professional Practice: From Materials to Consciousness

Several professional fields have already taken this step.

Theory U works with attention-based systemic transformation.

Presencing works with sensing and realising emerging possibilities.

The Five-Point Model works with innate human capacities.

IDG works with inner capacities for outer transformation.

Blissbode co-creates inner sustainability within interiors.

Gregg Braden’s The Divine Matrix and Danah Zohar’s quantum-inspired work on consciousness philosophically explore connections between consciousness, perception, reality and materiality.

Gregg Braden presents his work as a bridge between science, spirituality and human potential. Amazon, Gregg Braden.

These works must not be used as conclusive scientific evidence that interiors directly create particular states of consciousness.

But they belong to Blissbode’s intellectual history.

They challenge the mechanistic view of humanity and inspire the development of a more relational design practice.

Translated into interior design, this means that spaces can be designed with the intention of:

• strengthening experienced resilience
• supporting purposeful behaviour
• opening towards new possibilities
• increasing experienced energy and quality of life
• creating space for joy and conscious presence

This is not a guaranteed result.

It is an expansion of the profession’s toolkit and field of investigation.

Paradise-o-Metre: The False Paradise of Measuring Instruments

The industry loves its measuring instruments.

Light. Air. Temperature. Acoustics. Humidity. Energy.

They register real physical conditions, and they are necessary.

The problem begins when we elevate them into Paradise-o-Metres: instruments we treat as though they can tell us whether an environment is good, life-giving and humanly whole.

They cannot.

They can tell us:

• how much light is present
• how loud the sound is
• how the temperature changes
• how humid the air is
• how much energy the building consumes

But they cannot tell us whether the human being experiences:

• inner clarity
• emotional balance
• vitality
• meaning
• belonging
• conscious presence
• joy

This is where the industry’s measurement blindness lies.

We have made the instruments’ capacity to register into the boundary of what may professionally exist.

What the instrument cannot register is treated as secondary, subjective or irrelevant.

Paradise-o-Metre is Blissbode’s ironic term for this misunderstanding.

The instrument does not measure paradise.

It measures a physical parameter.

A room can have the correct temperature, good acoustics and sufficient daylight and still be experienced as lifeless, alienating or devoid of meaning.

Physical measurements should therefore not be abolished.

They must be deprived of their false monopoly on the truth about space.

The effects of the interior must also be investigated through:

• interviews
• questionnaires
• user observation
• behavioural mapping
• sensory preferences
• atmospheric registrations
• resonance registrations
• before-and-after evaluations
• complementary practice-based tools

We must not measure less. We must stop calling the measurable the whole of reality.

New Concepts, New Roles, New Revenue Streams

Architecture and interior design are facing a transformation that requires new concepts and new professional identities.

The term Enerqist™ describes the human being together with the space in which the person spends time over an extended period.

Just as an equipage consists of both horse and rider, an Enerqist™ consists of:

• the human being
• the space
• the relationship between them
• the time during which they exist together
• the mutual influence arising through use, sensing, action and atmosphere

Over time, the relationship becomes closer.

The human being leaves traces within the space through habits, movements, objects, narratives and emotional investments.

At the same time, the space makes its structures, materials, atmospheres, possibilities and limitations available to human life.

The Enerqist is therefore not static.

The Enerqist changes when:

• the person’s life changes
• the space is rebuilt or reorganised
• new objects and meanings are added
• old patterns are broken
• the use of the environment changes
• new people or functions enter
• the relationship between person and space becomes more or less conscious

The purpose is not merely to analyse the person or optimise the space as an isolated object.

The purpose is to work with the relational whole that they already constitute.

When the interior changes, the conditions of the Enerqist change.

When the person changes their actions, the Enerqist changes as well.

This reciprocal movement makes interior design more than the composition of materials and functions.

Interior design is the work of shaping the living relationship between the human being and the space in which the human being becomes.

This opens new revenue streams for the industry.

Not through magical promises.

Through the development of a professional discipline capable of working with what people sense but do not yet have precise language to describe.

Joy as a Professional Design Parameter

Joy is not simply a fleeting emotion.

Within Blissbode’s theoretical framework, joy is also understood as a state of consciousness and an indication that, in a given moment, person, environment, meaning and action are experienced as connected.

An interior can therefore be designed with the intention of:

• strengthening experienced energy
• supporting resilience
• creating quality of life
• inviting transformation
• opening towards new actions
• making joy more accessible

Design cannot guarantee these outcomes.

But it can create, qualify and evaluate the conditions for them.

This is the most radical and necessary upgrade of the interior design profession.

Joy Is the Ultimate Measure

The statement should not be withdrawn.

It must be understood correctly.

Joy is not an international physical unit.

It is not a universal answer.

It is not a promise of constant happiness.

Joy is the ultimate human measure of whether an interior makes life larger or smaller.

It may become visible as:

• a desire to spend time in the space
• spontaneous use
• an experienced sense of belonging
• creative activity
• sensory satisfaction
• humour
• lightness
• social connection
• a desire to invite others in
• greater care for the place
• the experience of being more fully oneself

Joy can be expansive.

It can also be quiet.

For some people, it exists in strong colours, ornamentation and complexity.

For others, it exists in light, precision, silence and a small number of carefully selected materials.

Joy has no single style.

But a profession that consistently produces joyless environments has lost its connection with the human being.

What Professionals Should Take Away

Architecture and interior design are in the midst of a global transformation in which sustainability can no longer be limited to external conditions.

The interior design of the future must:

• address people’s inner experience
• engage with psychological waste
• create joy as the highest human quality
• investigate consciousness without pretending that every problem of measurement has been resolved
• integrate empathy as a professional capacity
• work with energy, perception and inner states
• distinguish between research, theory, tradition and practice
• develop new concepts, methods and measuring instruments
• document without reducing
• be provocative without misleading

Professionals who take this seriously will stand at the forefront of a new era in interior design.

An era in which spaces do not merely support life.

They increase the experience of it.

Design for More Than Survival

If your interiors function but do not feel alive, it is time to ask a better question.

Not:

Have all the functions been positioned correctly?

But:

What kind of life does this space make possible?

Blissbode offers:

• joy-based client positioning
• the Bastian Model
• the Zohar/Hawkins Model
• the blue complexity markers
• atmospheric analyses
• sensory mapping
• Field Maps
• regenerative design processes
• masterclasses
• pilot projects
• documentation and evaluation

Do not design another space that a human being must endure. Create an environment in which a human being wants to feel alive.

Contact: Contact Blissbode

© Bonna Ravn Thomsen / Blissbode. Mechanical, photographic or electronic reproduction of this text, or any part of it, requires written permission from Blissbode.