Working to

make everyday life healthy,

by design.

The curse of the systems thinker is that one is always seeing patterns, always searching for the fundamental forces and dynamics that underlie a system and give rise to the peculiar results one sees. One is always – as we like to say in public health – looking upstream, for the root causes – and even their root causes. It’s hard to stay focused on the immediate problems at hand, when there are deeper, more fundamental causes of those problems that are – most perplexing to the systems thinker – so deeply embedded that they are rendered nearly invisible, or at least taken for granted. They are the givens, the fixed conditions that exist outside the solution space.

Spending time outdoors. It’s one of the five behaviors we use in our Building H Index framework to assess how products and services influence the health of their users. But let’s be honest – it’s not one of the more recognizable health behaviors like diet and physical activity. Yet we care about it because it does have significant health impacts. Spending time outdoors – and in nature – has been linked to a growing list of health benefits from lower blood pressure to avoiding myopia.