#4 - Michael Najjar @ SpaceBloom - Healthy Interior Design at Scale

Podcast Transcript on substack | Video on Youtube

My guest today is Michael Najjar. Michael is the CEO and founder of Spacebloom.

Based in Brussels, Spacebloom develops workspaces for people to be healthier, happier, and more productive at the office. They do it through data-driven & climate-friendly interior design.

In this episode, you will learn about:

1) the movement from interior design around identity constructs, based on

2) personal feelings to data-driven design for physical and mental well-being,

3) the opportunity interior design represents for our current build, what post-covid offices are becoming, and

4) how Spacebloom is scaling healthy interior design through its platform.

Interior design tends to serve our identity constructs, Michael focuses on using it for physical and mental well-being. His journey towards healthier spaces started far before founding Spacebloom. His university thesis already explored how to live in symbiosis with nature inside the city, integrating urban farming. He is now the founder and CEO of Spacebloom, where he partners with companies to create healthy & sustainable workspaces through data-driven interior design, for their people & business to thrive.

Feeling close to nature, he realized that “the most sustainable way for architects to do architecture is not to build anything” and he committed to improve interior design to make healthy buildings sustainably using what is already built, even if he was an architect (building focus), not interior designer. He has discovered the massive ROI of building improvements: low impact because we reuse existing business but massive transformative power.

The Covid Pandemic has accelerated the mutation of the office. It is no longer a place where everyone comes in for a 9 to 5. It is a space to socialize, collaborate, be together, and people can go home for deep work. There is less need for desks and opportunities to create a special place where employees can relate in more creative, relevant ways.

Ten years from now, he sees Spacebloom as a scaled digital solution where people can find all the elements they need to transform their homes and businesses: a marketplace with curated products.

For now, he is focusing on B2B because consumers aware are too few (too costly to acquire customers) and they lack urgency (apart from pregnant women or parents who need to make their home healthy for their kids) whereas businesses have KPIs (retention, talent attraction, absenteeism, productivity) that justify the investment in the improvement of the workplace.

Key aspects of the intervention:

• Colors
• Water
• Air Quality
• Acoustics
• Lights
• Furnitures — Ergonomics
• Plants

Michael works with CEOs and HR leads who tend to be aware already about health in the workplace. Companies using employee wellbeing software are easier to work with for instance.

Budget is the main resistance for workplace improvement projects, but small interventions can have powerful effects, there is a list of priorities and you see which ones your budget can address. You can always do something.

His recommendation for the resort is to use local materials and techniques, this is something that was lost but it is essential.

Michael bases his designs on the research from certifications (Well), the universities (Harvard) and thought leaders in Biophilic design. In the podcast, Michael showcases his platform and his process (May 2022 version):

Spacebloom’s key activities in a nutshell, as of May 2022

At the moment, Spacebloom uses no-code development for his first interface which already provides the scale necessary. His goal is to improve the UX through a coded platform in the future. He is reflecting on using AI to automate some of the recommendations based on the quiz he offers on his website.