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

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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.

Full Podcast Transcript by Descript below:

Mat: Maybe you can start with saying what you do in a nutshell, to get some context.

Michael Najjar: Okay. So I'm an architect and I was always passionate about how the spaces around us can impact our health. Because, you know, interior design, usually we perceive it as a reflection of our identities. When we design our house, it's a reflection of ourselves and I was always passionate about not to take this extrinsic approach that the spaces and our homes reflect our identities, but use this space to enhance our physical and mental wellbeing.

So, It started maybe at the end of my university studies where my thesis was about urban farming and how to be in symbiosis with nature inside the city. So every plot [00:02:00] had an urban plot and an agricultural plot. I'm not gonna explain all the project, but mainly it was about reconnecting people to nature inside the city. And then I worked in architecture offices and. Today I'm here. I wanted to, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and when I moved to Belgium from Lebanon, I decided to take the leap and work on my project.

Mat: And what is the project in the nutshell?

Michael Najjar: So now I'm focusing on workplace design. We help businesses create healthy and sustainable workplaces to engage employees, their people, and mainly to take care of their people because it's their biggest assets.

Mat: Gotcha. Okay. How did you get into specifically the workplace?

Michael Najjar: Actually at the beginning of the project, I wanted to start with the b2c, so consumers and then I realized that, they're not ready yet[00:03:00] or maybe I'm not ready because it demands a more Means, and marketing and awareness to do.

And I realized that businesses are much more ready to do this change. Because first you have tangible benefits on performance, productivity, health and wellbeing.

In the house you have, I like to compare it to organic food.

When you eat organic food, you don't feel the change directly. You invest in the long term, and it's the same for your house. If you buy furniture where you have a lot of blue and toxic elements and paint, et cetera. These furniture have molecules that goes in the air that are toxic for us, and people don't usually know that. And it effects our heads. So you have a lot of things, like indoor air quality, for example, is very important, but if you don't have an air monitor, you can't know if the air is good or bad. And the B2C side. There was a lot of awareness to do. That's why I decided to start with the B2B and then go to B2C [00:04:00] again.

B2C is the biggest impact, I think.

Mat: You said if you don't have an air quality monitor, you can't really know it. Is there one that consumers could buy?

Michael Najjar: Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot on the market. There is, for housing for example, Netatmo, it's a French company, part of Legrand I think. It's very good because they have an app and you can check everything on the app.

For offices you need to monitor air quality in different rooms. So you need a system that can connect all the devices. I think uh, Kaiterra for example Do a very good job for this.

You have a lot of brands. I did my small selection to work with, and by the way, the market of air quality is booming right now. people are more and more aware about air quality and the importance of air quality. Like you have facts, alarming facts, you know, that air quality, for example, Can be two to five times [00:05:00] worse inside than outside.

It's huge. And when you cook, for example, it's 10 times worse. So that's why you have like best practices to, to improve air quality. It's very simple. Just have to open the windows like every two, three hours. But people don't know that. I think that more and more people are being more aware about this, especially after the pandemic. It, it amplified this need.

Mat: Crazy. Yeah, we got a air purifier. But I have to say that when we have the air conditioning on, we don't want to be opening the windows especially in Barcelona. We don't believe the air quality outside is better than, than inside.

Okay. What do you like best about doing what you've been doing for the past few months, like starting a business in that particular field now with b2b? What is most. Exciting to you.

Michael Najjar: What the most exciting is knowing that, like we all work, right? We work a lot of time every day, and it's a big part of our lives. So, improving this environment where you're safe and, and healthy is very important for me[00:06:00] and I find it very important to do that, like to impact this space first and then go to the home. But I find it very interesting to have an impact on people's health and performance, at work.

Mat: And when you do, when you're engaged with the B2B clients, do you do this study first of how is the air quality in the office at the beginning and then so that you can show like you have different indicators that you.

Michael Najjar: So, the process of how I work now.

The first process is the onboarding process. I explain to the client what we will do and the first step is to do a survey with the employees, a workplace performance survey. We analyze the needs of the employees, how they work, what they need. Like they need two monitors. The amount of light they need, silence space to focus in silence. Everyone has different needs.

It's the data collection phase, and then we have a small questionnaire with the management team, which is more a questionnaire about what is the vision of the company, what are your goals, what do you want to [00:07:00] accomplish, what is your budget for the project .

After all this data collection, you have qualitative and quantitative data , we analyze all the data and we propose solutions that goes from space layout. So how to manage the space with the desks and all the stuff: the monitors, the meeting rooms, et cetera.

Then you have the technical side, so air quality, the amount of lights, the quality of the water they drink. The acoustics also are very important. So these are the technical factors. And then we have the design factors.

Mat: This is this, this you do before and after, I guess.

Michael Najjar: Yes, Yes, exactly. You have a pre-evaluation and a post evaluation to measure the impact of the intervention. So yeah, it's very important to do a post evaluation after like six months or one year, first to know if everybody's happy with the space and if there is some improvement that we should make.

Because usually in design, [00:08:00] when you do interior design, it's very subjective, right? Like the architect, maybe he likes blue, he likes red, he likes yellow, and is very subjective. I try to have a more scientific approach to design, which is based on scientific facts, and not just, I like red or I like blue.

So yeah. We propose solutions, and then I was saying that the design approach we use is called the biophilic design. And today it's a movement, I think especially after the pandemic, biophilic design. The aim of biophilic design is to connect people to nature indoors. it's actually our innate connection as humans, it's our innate connection to nature.

Throughout our evolution. 99% of our time, we were connected to nature. When the industrial revolution started, and the cities started to grow, we cut out our connection with nature. [00:09:00] And it's in our DNA, this connection. When we cut it out, we had a lot of health issues like stress, cancer, so biophilic design tries to reconnect you to nature through plants, through colors, through patterns.

So you have a different strategies. Actually. You have 14 patterns of biophilic design that you can apply in your spaces that enhance your connection to nature. Indoors.

Mat: What influenced you most to get there? I mean, your thesis at university was already going in that direction. What made you click? It looks like it's a path because you've been doing this for so many years now.

Michael Najjar: Yeah.

Mat: So what, what initiated you, what triggered you to start thinking about those things?

Michael Najjar: Maybe I, I always had this connection. I, I love to do activities outdoors and nature and hikes, etcetera. And even like in my thesis project, I didn't know about biophilic design, but I wanted to create [00:10:00] architecture and I'm an architect so I didn't work in indoor spaces. I worked in buildings and I always had this sustainable approach on how to create healthy buildings and, healthy architecture, but, actually the trigger, I don't know if it's a specific time, but I realized that. The most sustainable way for architects to do architecture is to not build anything

Because when you build, you use resources, right?

Mat: Yeah.

Michael Najjar: And then I realize, okay, instead of building more and more and more and using resources, maybe we can do with what we have and optimize what we have, the indoor spaces. And I find that changing the indoors has much more impact than building sustainable buildings again, you know .

Mat: Gotcha. If you fast forward 10 years, where are you, What are you [00:11:00] doing , this project?

Michael Najjar: I would hope in this project To have an impact on the consumers, and my service is digital, to be able to scale it to the max. Going to B2C will allow me to have maximum impact on people's homes and, We need to create a marketplace where we have ethical and sustainable products for the home and, push people to consume more responsibly. That's my goal in 10 years to have maximum impact on design and to shop responsibly things for your home. Maybe curate all the sustainable and ethical products in one marketplace so you can shop on one address only. Because it's very difficult to know which furniture is good or bad.

You need to, to do a lot of research, what are the materials they use, what are the toxic materials? What are the woods that are certified in the furniture? There's a lot of research to do

Mat: It's tough. I mean, I remember Living Building Challenge was having a marketplace [00:12:00] as well. And a few other NGOs in France I was seeing as well. But it's tough because you need the overall framework to understand how to navigate the space, and then you need to go deep into each product. And as you said, like the best product is no product. Just as, little as you can. So it's basically having a scale of, how healthy or how not healthy it is. But, there are so many parameters because sometimes the thing when you use it is okay, but the production to get to that thing is actually not so good. Okay. And you talk a lot about scientific research now in this call, but also on the website, it seems to be evidence based, what you do. How do you do the research? How difficult is it for you to navigate?

I've been doing research for noesun for years now. And it's rough because there are so many experts speaking about one single topic, and you need to talk about so many topics for your project as well, because the home is touching many different aspects of life. It's a massive endeavor.

How do you prioritize, how have you been able to get to those insights that you have already?

Michael Najjar: [00:13:00] I research a lot on the web.

And now there are a lot of certifications actually, like the well certification that is international, which is about healthy indoors, mainly how to create healthy indoors. It's a 10 year scientific research. On indoor spaces and how to improve them to be healthy. And they treat like air quality. They give you a big database and big knowledge base about how to improve the health of a space. And this is like a very big chunk of the research. They did a very good job about healthy spaces.

Then you have Harvard too, The top university is doing a lot of research about air quality, water quality, how to improve the health of your home.

There are a lot of Of universities working on that and the well certification mainly, and then biophilic design. You have other people leading this field. But yeah, there's a lot.

And you should do your research and I will do your research, my research for you. [00:14:00] But yeah, now, especially now, there's a movement. It's not a trend and it's here to stay, I think.

Mat: Yeah. Yeah. What's the percentage of people that you think are conscious about this in your meetings? B2B, B2C. Are people aware when you talk with them.

Michael Najjar: B2C, very few people are aware of this and B2B a bit more especially scale up and small and medium, companies are much more aware. Startups are aware about this problem, but they don't have the budget to do it. It's not a priority.

When you explain the benefits of improving the health of a space, How it impacts performance, productivity, wellbeing with your people. They are convinced but sometimes don't have the budget. And maybe it's not a priority, but, what I saw is that scale ups and small and medium companies, corporate too, are very aware about this problem.[00:15:00]

Now you have a lot of software that monitors employee wellbeing, for example. A lot of corporate companies are using this kind of software to track and prevent burnouts . My solution, we are aligned with this goal. So the goal is the same to improve employee wellbeing, but the means are different.

I use the space to improve it and they use data and constant monitoring with employees. So it's the same objective, but, different, intervention.

Mat: The divide between the individual and the business is that the business has key clear KPIs to track.

Michael Najjar: Exactly.

Mat: And by trying to move the performance and the, well, not the wellbeing, I guess they care more about retention and performance. Yes. By moving those, those values, those KPIs, let's say, then they worry about the space and then you bring other benefits for the wellbeing and the inner benefits for the individuals. But it doesn't come from there. It comes from that bottom line.

Michael Najjar: It comes from KPIs on, [00:16:00] retention , attract new talent. And I think wellbeing is important too, but you have, tangible KPIs that you can measure. Yeah.

Mat: Because if wellbeing was the driver, then you would see it on the individuals as well.

Michael Najjar: Yes.

Mat: You see more on the b2b.

Michael Najjar: Yeah, exactly. Okay. But on the side, it's more on, it's like, like I said, it's like eating organic foods. The investment is in the long term, and you don't see it now, but if you have bad air quality for 10 years in your house, you will have health problems maybe in 10 years. But because it's not tangible in the moment. People tend not to invest in this kind of thing, you know?

Mat: Yeah. But there's no urgency,

Michael Najjar: yeah. There's no urgency, that's why.

Mat: Okay. You had consumers like B2C clients before?

Michael Najjar: Actually b2c and talking about urgency. I found an urgency in a specific, very specific target, which is, Pregnant women. [00:17:00] Because they want, a very healthy, room for their kids.

Mat: That's, that's how, that's the reason why we got the air, pur fire. Yeah. And you meet And the humidifier. Yeah. Yeah. We got a few things and, yeah.

Michael Najjar: Yeah. So especially for baby, because first baby, you want the top of the top . you have urgency. So when you say to a pregnant woman, do you know that air quality, can be two to five times worse? It creates urgency and it's real facts.

Mat: Have you played with this, like, have you done specific materials for pregnant women or for couples?

Michael Najjar: No, actually I did a, yeah, I did a small case study with, with a friend, and we did a case study for their kids' bedroom. I recommended, a lot of furniture and paint and air quality.

So I designed, if you want, their, their kids' bedroom, and recommended product, what I realized is that, the budget is more than buying IKEA furniture, for example. And this is something that people are not sometimes, happy to pay more for the same [00:18:00] design.

I don't want to say IKEA is not healthy because it depends on the products. In general, you tend to pay a bit more for healthy and sustainable products.

Mat: I think people who are expecting babies. it's really a good opportunity for you, also we are so desperate because we really want the best for our kids. you will be ready to pay a bit more. Like we got the best air purifier we could find on the market and it was way more expensive than others. We still got it because that was super important for us, that he sleeps in a, in a good air quality room. We tend to count much less for our kids than we count for ourselves. The budget increases so much when it's for him.

Michael Najjar: Yeah. It's like, like our pets too, like for the cats and dogs.

Mat: It's, it's like the, like for the pets, but like multiply by 10, do you have anything online about this?

Michael Najjar: Online. No, but I have a case study for the workspace that I can show you maybe. For the kids, I did it offline, I can't show you anything right now.

Mat: I don't know how many people are looking for this, but like, that's probably a good opportunity for you to get some marketing or get people to [00:19:00] know you

Michael Najjar: For the kids. Mm.

Mat: Do you wanna show me your case study now ?

Uh, yeah. Yeah.

Michael Najjar: Okay, Can you see my screen?

Mat: Yes.

Michael Najjar: Okay, so this is a case study we did for Dockmotion. It's a small company here in Belgium. So, this is the survey, the questionnaire we did for the employees. It goes from temperature to lighting, visual sensations. If there is noise, in the office, how clean is it? How long do you spend working at, quantitative data. How comfortable is your chair? So ergonomics are important too. The following activities are important. So to know what is supported or not to see what are the problems. And you see here the percentages. You have a lot of questions about the performance of the space that you can analyze. And it's like question to know what are the needs of each employees and what we should improve. So this is the first [00:20:00] survey for the employees.

Mat: This is the overall , all employees in one place. And then I guess you look at each, workstation.

Michael Najjar: Yes. And it's anonymous. They don't put their names so they can, answer, with transparency and honesty. Then you have the questionnaire for the management team. He put some, like some pictures. What is your company's culture, long term goal, et cetera. What is your budget? And then I propose. So here we have the design board. So this is the CRM platform. The back, the collaboration platform with the client. So here you have the design boards, you have the existing floor plan, the proposed, with a 3D that you can interact with.

And then here you have some products that I recommend for the space. It goes from paint to water, air quality, acoustics, et cetera, plants and furniture. And here I explain a bit, and here we have all the products with the total budget.

Mat: I'm guessing that the plants are [00:21:00] filtering the air.

Michael Najjar: Yes, exactly.

Cool. That's, and you have all the products here. You can approve or decline. You can chat with the designer on the platform. And, and when you're happy with the selection, I do a quote, an invoice, and then you can pay everything online. So all the process is digital.

Mat: You don't have, you don't even have to go to the office ideally.

Michael Najjar: No. You should go just maybe if I want to do some, air quality monitoring, I should go but I don't need to go in a physical space. That's why it's interesting because all the process is digital.

You see pictures of the space, they send you dimensions on the questionnaire so you can do the plan. Again, if it's a much bigger space, maybe you need to go there and take measurements, but The process is digital. This is the idea to do it digital in order to scale it to the maximum of people.

Mat: Gotcha. Super cool. And Right now you, you're putting a few resources online [00:22:00] already so that people can discover on their own. How educated are they when they get to you?

Michael Najjar: Actually it depends on how you target, because I realized, my main contact is, HR and CEOs. If you have companies working with, employee wellbeing software for example, it means that they are aware about the wellbeing. So I tend to go directly on the converted people, converted companies, and hijack this awareness funnel.

Mat: Gotcha. When you say the employee wellbeing software, are they questionnaire type of software or it's more like text recognition and they see how many times you connect to your email or how you respond to Slack and they're like, Oh yeah,

Michael Najjar: you have different, Yeah, you have different techniques actually. But the main one is to constantly ask questions for the employees. How do you feel? Frequent surveys with employees that monitors how they feel. So that way you prevent burnouts. It's mainly questions that you ask for employees on a maybe weekly or [00:23:00] monthly basis.

Mat: We renovated the flat and I didn't know about a few of the things I knew after, because I researched for noesun after researching for the flat, and I'm on the journey to understand and it's, it's a big thing. I should have worked with you, but basically it felt a bit bad when I realized a few of the choices I made were actually aligned with what you do. How do you do when clients have invested in an office three or four years ago, and the plan was to keep it for 10? And that now you're telling them, Oh, actually those decisions were not, were not great. How does it feel to them? And are they still making the investment or you need to wait for them to finish their cycle of, managing the asset because they have a plan for so many years of, used life, I guess.

Michael Najjar: Yeah. Yeah. But actually you have, like in the design, you have different scales of interventions you can do, You can optimize this as an existing space. So if you have already the furniture . You did, a small design if you want, and you just want to [00:24:00] optimize the health of your space. You have strategies like how to improve air quality, how to improve acoustics, how to improve the amount of natural light entering the space. So you have some techniques you can do. It's like a small interventions .

You can optimize a space for any budget. Actually, you can do it from scratch or you can just optimize an existing space. So it depends on what you need. It's like when you go to a doctor, when you go to a doctor, if you have a problem. He do his diagnostic and he said, Okay, you have this kind of problems and we, we need to solve them. And you have five priority problems and low priority problems. So it's the same process.

Mat: Gotcha. Okay. What is the one thing they discover when they come work with you? Because I guess we pinpointed that the most important for them is to retain employees and make them happier and higher performance. Are there things that they're like, Oh God, we had no clue. And it's great because we're gonna benefit even more [00:25:00] from the project with you. What are those?

Michael Najjar: Mainly, it's retention because especially after covid. The pandemic amplified this need especially with people when we started working from home. And now you have the majority of companies doing hybrid work , maybe you work two days a week at home and three days a week at the office. So, and now you have this big question, Should we go back to the office or should we keep this flexibility and how do we manage this flexibility?

So one of the strategies to attract employees back to the office is to improve the space and, adapt it to the new needs. Everyone's asking a bit like existential questions right now about is the work I do meaningful and fulfilling for me?

I think that , especially after the pandemic people are much more interested in the purpose than in the paycheck today.

Mat: I guess that if the [00:26:00] office is getting better, and you start promoting as well that the office is improving the air quality and all those aspects, people are gonna start thinking about their homes as well.

Michael Najjar: And now the workplace is changing a bit, especially in the functionality of the workplace, because now with hybrid work, if you had, a hundred employees, you needed, let's say a hundred square meters. Now if you, you don't have the hundred every day, all day, so it's much more flexible. So maybe you need less space than before. So you need to rearrange to rear adapt your space for collaborative work instead of just. Everyone going to the office and work on his desk and, and just a nine to five job.

I think that the workplace, especially after the pandemic, needs to readapt to the new normal, the new ways of working and to adapt actually to this hybrid mode, and to the new needs of their employees.

Mat: I saw a massage [00:27:00] chair on the quotes that you were having. It reminds me at Google we had so many different, Rooms with different cool things, and I remember my friends wanting to visit me or my mom wanting to visit me at Google just because she could use the cool massage chair. I'm guessing those are the new things, you try to have some key amenities for the office so that people are motivated to go and, and just spend some time.

Michael Najjar: Yeah, exactly. Spend some time talk with their colleagues, Not just, just go there and work and, and go back home. Now the workplace, in my opinion, will be the place where we, you collaborate and you brainstorm with the team. And when you need to do focused works, you stay at home or you, you take a small cabin in your workplace and you work. But yeah, it's, it'll be much more collaborative and flexible than before.

Mat: Like having your own private club, the employees can access that, that cool place that you create. Cool. Apart from the massage chair, what are the cool amenities that people are starting to bring in the office that maybe before were not [00:28:00] so thought through?

Michael Najjar: So the air purifiers, for example, having a lot of plants is important. The colors are important too. The colors you choose because you know that colors have an impact on our psychology, we feel different emotions when we are, With colors. Yellow and red, for example, they excite us. Blue and green are more calming. You have a lot, a lot of scientific studies about this subject. It's important to know which color to use, which tonality, depending on the space and the energy you want to give to each space.

Mat: Do you work with other architects and do you, sometimes you come in and like you need to work with a team and you need to convince them, or are they usually aware already and they're happy you're taking care of this part because they might not know as as much as you do.

Michael Najjar: Maybe they don't know how to do it, but they are aware of it and they know that it's important. So sometimes when an architect don't [00:29:00] know about the subjects, I'm happy to explain and to give him the right resources. Architects are more and more aware about this subject, about especially biophilic design and health in the spaces because the certifications, the well certifications for example, it's booming right now.

A lot of people are taking it. And I think it's a very good thing. People are more aware about being healthy in the spaces. Architect has a role to play too when they design a space to put health and wellbeing first. Not only design nice things, but healthy things too.

Mat: Is it something you're looking at to be a kind of the part of the back office of the architects as well and be like a partner that can do the

Michael Najjar: Yeah, maybe, maybe in the long term, yeah, maybe. I don't want to position myself as a competitor . We should work in the same way, you know? I'm an architect and my job is to make all architects work [00:30:00] like this in this way, you know, and we should all work in this direction. Cause it is the direction that puts people's health and respect the planet. It's the way forward.

Mat: Gotcha. And apart from money, is there other objections or resistance that you see when working with clients.

Michael Najjar: Yeah, the budget, it's always the budget because working that way is a bit more expensive. Sometimes when you just want to optimize a space, it's not always more expensive, if you want to add plants, it's not. But yeah, when you are designing from scratch a project, it may be a bit more expensive to do it that way. But when you're optimizing a space, no, you can just optimize, like invest a bit and, some things, some products, some plants, some paint with colors. It's not always very expensive.

Sometimes you have people that don't believe you, but. When they don't believe you. I say it's scientific facts, It's not an opinion, you know?[00:31:00] I send them the research. Depend on the clients.

Mat: Okay. Right now we are redesigning the resort. My focus has been on spaces in nature . Multiple buildings, not so much constraint on how much land you have because it's away from the city. I'm looking deeply at biophilic design. I'm looking at regenerative buildings. I've looked more at the living building challenge, content and certifications than the, well, but I think they're quite aligned. What, what is your recommendation apart from those certifications when looking at a project like this?

I was engaging with Naho Iguchi, she's an ecological artist and she's also aware of biophilic design and regenerative solutions. And I came very quickly to the conclusion that building in nature is actually something we should not do. If we want to be fully, uh, not impactful in a not negative way, we should not be building anymore. So I have this kind of guilt, of wanting to do this. The direction I'm taking is to build on lands [00:32:00] that have been occupied by humans already, but are more remote and hopefully treat a land that has been damaged by human beings just because the soil has been degraded or maybe some pollution. From your point of view, engaging in this for a while already, and also you've been doing more normal architecture, , what would be your recommendation? How would you take on the challenge?

Michael Najjar: Yeah. Uh, my recommendation for you is to first choose local materials, to the maximum. Limit the importation of non local materials and resources. And especially integrate nature in your building process. Where is the location of the building you want to do?

Mat: There's, there's no location. Right now, we are working on the concept, and then we will be applying the concept to wherever we have funds for and we find an opportunity for the land.

Michael Najjar: Yeah. So for me, the most sustainable way is to build it with local materials, with sustain. Now you have a lot of , companies working on that, like. For example, building blocks made with, earthy materials, you know?

Mat: Yeah.

Michael Najjar: And, and there's a lot of [00:33:00] innovations today on building materials that are less polluting. So I think you can start with that it's the most relevant

Mat: Are there specific ones? I read about the hempcrete, the one with the hemp and the earth or the kind of concrete. also Yeah, purely earth, you basically extract and then you have a machine to process it. Are there ones that are better or it's just about the, the type of land you have?

Michael Najjar: Yeah, it's the type of land you have. It depends really on the location. That's something we had before industrialization. You had no transport. You were obliged to build these local materials. And that's something we lost.

So we have to go back to the old way. And building with the land and the context around you. It depends where you'll be. I will send you companies that works in the sustainable materials and innovating.

Mat: What about the platform you were showing me earlier, are you coding it yourself? Are you developing it?

Michael Najjar: Yeah, for now it's, but it's all no code, so I'm not coding myself. The objective is to do an [00:34:00] operational MVP so that I can test with clients and if all goes well, I will have to code it from scratch.

Mat: So your plan, your plan is to code When it's working

Michael Najjar: the prototype is working for now and I don't need more than this. So if all goes well, I do it from scratch.

Mat: When you design an office at the moment, and I guess for the home, it's gonna be the same process, do you take into account the activities during the day, like at Sunrise, this happens at Sunset, this happens, and these are all the activities during the day. Do you map the user experience in some way?

Michael Najjar: That's why we do the survey with the employees because we ask them about how they work during the day and what they need. This is the data collection on the first step. It's really, focused on employee experience and what they need.

For example, you have lightings now that are called biodynamic lighting, this is very good for offices, because the lighting adapts. During the day, it has a blue color temperature. Then when it moves [00:35:00] through the day, it goes to yellow, before the sunset. It allows the worker adapt to their circadian rhythm, they feel less stressed and they sleep better. Overall it's much better for their health.

Mat: I guess. Also you realize it's late because sometimes you, if you have a very well lit room, you're like, it's 10:00 PM you're like, Oh God, the days flew by. Cool. And does it become red at the end of the day?

Michael Najjar: No. No, no. It's just from blue to yellow and it's a very subtle change.

Mat: Gotcha. In our bedroom, we have, red lights for the night, just like in submarines. We just turned on the red light. People think it's, weird, but it's pretty useful for the night.

Cool. Cool. Michael? How long before you have the version that is operational, and you can decide if you could or not.

Michael Najjar: Now it's operational. I can use it. So I can work on it right now. And yeah, the idea is to test it and to improve it. And when, I get funding, I do the coding website.

Mat: Is there a way for you to, to maintain it without code [00:36:00] and work with it for you and have many clients? You could scale it to how many clients with this current setup.

Michael Najjar: I can scale it to, as many clients as I want. So I'm not sure, maybe I don't need to code it, again, because it's gonna cost a lot of money. Mainly if I want to recode it's just for the experience to be smooth as possible.

But it's not a priority. The priority is to make it work and to do it in a nice way.

Mat: What is the potential for AI. Having some kind of model that just trains

Michael Najjar: There is potential for ai. I don't know if it's AI or machine learning, I'm not sure. But for example, on my websites, the first thing you can do is a quick space quiz. So I ask you very simple questions, a yes no, 10 questions, and you can do it right now .Questions about your space and we evaluate, you have three answers, unhealthy. Okay. And you're on the right path, to see a bit the health of your space and [00:37:00] where AI can or, or machine learning can enter in this process is that at the end of the quiz, I can recommend you products on what you answered. So if you answered me, I don't, open windows means that air quality may be bad in your space. I can recommend you air purifiers, plants, et cetera. So I can do products recommendation, after the quizz.

Mat: Michael, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. It was fascinating to hear about your journey and Spacebloom as a company. Enjoy what is coming.

You can find out more about Spacebloom on their website: spacebloom.co