It's hardly rocket science, especially in a world accustomed to working by "best practices" and designing offices for productivity's sake. In healthcare, though, it's only recently that researchers have assembled data from hundreds of individual studies - patients who see trees outside their windows are released sooner than those who see a brick wall; patients in private rooms get fewer infections; patients in well-lit rooms use 22 percent less pain medication after surgery than those in dim ones; and so on - much less put it into practice. "Not enough people administering hospitals know about it; not enough design people know about it," explains Rosalyn Cama, president of the design firm Cama and chair of the board of the Center for Health Design, a nonprofit working to spread the new design gospel. "Corporate America has paid attention to these kinds of things for years, but in healthcare, no one has."

I talk to Rosalyn Cama on my cellphone in the hallway of an Austin hospital. My father is in a room about 20 steps away, and suddenly all this research about views and noise and lighting is no longer just theory on a black-and-white page. The first thing I did after my father got settled in was look out the window: There was a big tree with limbs like splayed fingers and a fringe of stubborn yellow leaves unwilling to admit it's February. But the lighting is dim, and announcements spurt from a speaker over my dad's shoulder. Luckily, they're almost drowned out by the sound of bubbling water, like an aquarium aerator, but it's from the device designed to drain his lung, not an intentional intervention of virtual nature.