We live immersed in a saturated visual and sensory ecosystem. Every day we are flooded with notifications, images, noise, and continuous streams of input that turn attention into a fragile and fragmented resource. In this context, contemporary design is gradually moving beyond purely aesthetic or functional concerns to explore something more subtle: perceptual and emotional wellbeing.

In recent years, there has been growing discussion around healing design, neuroaesthetics, and sensory environments capable of influencing our mental state. The goal is no longer simply to create “beautiful” objects, but to design experiences that slow down our rhythm, foster awareness, and restore a sense of presence. Design is therefore entering into dialogue with neuroscience, environmental psychology, and everyday rituals, taking on an almost therapeutic role.

It is interesting to observe how this research is emerging precisely at a historical moment marked by widespread anxiety, digital acceleration, and cognitive overload. In a society that constantly pushes us toward performance and efficiency, contemporary luxury seems to have become the ability to pause, contemplate, and breathe. It is no surprise, then, that many designers are working with light, sound, posture, and materials as tools to reactivate perception and create small spaces of suspension. During the upcoming edition of 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen, this reflection takes tangible form in Design on Prescription, an exhibition by Danish designer Lise Vester hosted at OFFICINET.

“I am interested in understanding how design can capture those small moments of wonder we experience in nature — when we look at the sky and are struck by a particular atmosphere, or by unexpected elements that change the way we perceive the world,” 

— Lise Vester

For the occasion, OFFICINET, once the pharmacy of Frederiks Hospital and now part of Designmuseum Danmark, is transformed into a kind of “sensory pharmacy.” The choice of venue is far from accidental: the Latin word officin translates as “workshop,” a place where something is mixed, refined, and dispensed. It is precisely this idea of design alchemy that guides Lise Vester’s work.

The designer creates an immersive environment where craftsmanship, material research, and healing design principles converge in installations that function as poetic prescriptions. Sound, reflections, light, and posture are utilized as a means to decelerate perceptual time and create new viewpoints regarding the body and space. The whole performance is supported by sounds, scents, and neuroaesthetics, which can be described as an area of study examining the effect of sensory experiences on human perceptions and feelings.

“In the exhibition, I work with the senses, the body, and aesthetic experiences almost like an alchemist, mixing materials, light, form, and experimental techniques into new perspectives and sensory pauses.”

— Lise Vester

The exhibition unfolds around four long “pharmacy counters,” each dedicated to a specific sense and conceived as an experiential prescription. Sound takes shape through a series of wind chimes tuned to different tones and activated by the movement of air and people. Air becomes audible, transforming into a subtle presence that awakens attention and awareness. Sight is explored through Reflections Mirrors, blown-glass mirrors in which concave and convex surfaces distort the perception of body and space, suggesting entirely new viewpoints. Light becomes the protagonist in the Lighthouse chandelier, a luminous installation that generates fluid reflections and shifting atmospheres, inviting visitors to move slowly through the space, somewhere between wonder and calm.

Finally, the body comes into play with Dream View Bench, a reclined seating piece that encourages visitors to lean back and direct their gaze upward. A simple gesture that transforms looking at the sky into an everyday ritual of pause and imagination.

Alongside the finished works, the counters also display elements of the creative process: optical lenses, scale models, prototypes, and research notes arranged within niches inspired by the orderly drawers of historic pharmacies and pharmaceutical blister packs. Each project is accompanied by a kind of “design prescription” explaining the techniques, scientific references, and inspirations behind the objects.

Other works also appear throughout the exhibition, including Fragments and Dream View Sphere, which continue the investigation into perception, daydreaming, and shifts in perspective. Completing the experience is a “prescription machine” that prints fictional prescriptions accompanied by graphic drawings and short texts — a playful device that allows visitors to take the exhibition’s principles home with them.

In an era where everything competes for our attention, Lise Vester instead chooses to slow it down. And perhaps this is the most radical form of contemporary design today: not adding more noise, but creating the conditions to perceive differently what already surrounds us.

The exhibition ultimately raises a question that extends beyond design itself to the very way we choose to inhabit the present: can objects become tools for care, presence, and collective wellbeing? And what is the responsibility of designers and the creative community today to create experiences which, besides being for consumption and display, will also provide some emotional and sensory richness to our lives?
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Words: Simone Lorusso
Photography: Cecilie Jegsen
Exhibition design: Andre Bahremand & Jonas Swienty
Graphic design: On Display
Sound design: Studio BC Joshua