Geoff Manaugh is an editor at Archinect and the author of BLDGBLOG. He recently completed his first novel, about architecture and surveillance in London.

In 2005, researchers funded by the National Institute of Aging tested the effectiveness of walking on cobblestones as a means to stimulate pressure points on the bottom of subjects’ feet. The results implied that daily walking on flat, paved, urban surfaces can lead to a kind of reflexological atrophy in one’s arches, heels, and toes. This was found to affect much larger, and more serious, health issues, including blood pressure and bodily immunity.

Paved into the flat surfaces of roads and sidewalks, in other words, are illnesses, long-term injuries that otherwise disguise themselves as aging.

Those researchers then found that "walking on a cobblestone mat surface resulted in significant reductions in blood pressure and improvements in balance and physical performance among adults 60 and over." Out of those tests thus came the design of a new cobblestone mat that specifically engages with "the principles of reflexology, in that the uneven surface of the cobblestones stimulates and regulates 'acupoints'… purportedly linked to all organs and tissues of the body." Short walks across these mats should therefore be considered a form of preventive medicine.

My point, however, is not to draw undue attention upon the benefits of cobblestone mats, but to infer from their existence that other, seemingly trivial redesigns of everyday objects, from pens to stairways, could improve our health.

Famously, for instance, a cinema in Japan has begun to use carefully timed smells as emotional triggers during specific film scenes; could a similar technique be applied elsewhere – aromatherapy on the scale of whole cities? Or, instead of seeing a psychoanalyst, you go to watch a scented film…

On the other hand, perhaps there are specifically colored paints that, when applied to cars, work to assuage a driver’s impulse toward road rage, lowering blood pressure?

More realistically speaking, the question becomes: what other forms of illness exist, designed into our products and cities? What overlooked reflexologies now lie dormant, for instance, under-served by the world of modern objects? Are there fabrics that, when brushed against the skin, release endorphins – and, thus, whole new lines of clothing that work as alternative antidepressants?

How can design itself – a sustained and rigorous remolding of the world – be used as a form of preventive medicine?