The WELL Building Standard
The WELL Building StandardTM is a public benefit corporation that is leading the way towards encouraging health and wellness in communities and buildings across the globe. The International WELL Building InstituteTM (IWBI) formed back in 2013 where they worked on the WELL Building Standard that launched a year later in 2014, after six years of research and development in total. [1]
The standard consists of seven main concepts that comprehensively address both design and operations and how they impact and influence human behaviours related to health and well-being. These seven concepts are: [2]
Air
The air concept focuses on strategies to help deliver cleaner air as it is a key component to our overall health. This concept has a number of different aspects such as a smoking ban, air quality standards, air filtration and ventilation effectiveness.
Water
The WELL Building Standard promotes high water quality and includes strategies such as public water additives, drinking water promotion and fundamental water quality.
Nourishment
Nourishment is also a key concept for the WELL standard as it aims to limit the presence of unhealthy foods and encourage better food culture. This concept focuses on aspects such as fruits and vegetables, processed food, allergies, cleanliness, contamination and artificial ingredients.
Light
Lighting systems are important to the WELL standard as they are designed to enhance experience, promote sleep and improve alertness. This concept includes visual lighting design, solar glare control, colour quality and daylight modelling.
Fitness
WELL promotes a healthy and active lifestyle and believes regular exercise is important to achieve full health. This concept includes a variety of features such as structured fitness opportunities, fitness equipment, active furnishings and activity incentive programs.
Comfort
The WELL standard creates a distraction-free, comfortable and productive indoor environment for your workplace through strategies including thermal comfort, sound masking, sound barriers and individual thermal control.
Mind
Cognitive and emotional health is a very important concept within the WELL standard as it determines how we perform in the workplace. This aspect includes health and wellness awareness, integrative design, a healthy sleep policy and business travel.
Innovation
Last but not least is the innovation concept, this concept encourages innovation by allowing projects to submit ideas for new features within the WELL concepts and includes five innovation strategies in total.
Sources: [1] wellcertified [2] wellcertified-features
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