Our instincts tell us that there is something wrong with acres of relentless fluorescent-lit office space, and we are right. Film directors and photographers who use such spaces to depict scenes and feelings of alienation have an innate understanding that something is wrong with them. Again, their instincts are right.Wilkins's research does not stop at the visual disturbance caused by striped patterns in offices and Underground stations. He also cites railings and even the herringbone pattern of bricks that urban landscape designers insist on using as pavement in newly, and often misguidedly, pedestrianised streets.An increasing number of office workers are optingto work at home whenever possible. It may be, of course, that as books like Wilkins's are only very recent, designers and architects have yet to recognise the full impact of the interiors they shape. The very idea that we can be commissioning interiors that trigger epileptic fits does seem extraordinary.Nevertheless, you now know - assuming, like me, that some of Wilkins's findings come as a revelation - that some of the interiors you find horrid really are bad for you. But then in the Fifties, architects and designers began to be mightily impressed by the visual rigour of the open-plan office, never thinking that certain arrangements of fluorescent light fittings would cause discomfort and even illness in those who toiled beneath them.What is remarkable is that such designs continue to proliferate.

Some of these would have graced the pages of design magazines and been written up in glowing terms. The effect is like that of a stroboscope flickering in a nightclub, and like a stroboscope can cause temporary memory lapses, throbbing headaches, migraine and epileptic fits.Wilkins refers, without naming names, to fashionable office fit-outs produced by trendy but reputable designers that have had much the same effect as Op Art paintings. Much the same difficulty is faced by those looking down an escalator shaft or sitting under regularly spaced fluorescent light fittings in the suspended and gridded ceilings of open-plan offices. Those not so susceptible to visual stress may experience some of the disturbances that Wilkins cites when, for example, driving along a classic French avenue with bright sunlight flickering between regularly planted trees. He cites the famous case of curators in a national gallery complaining of headaches and dizziness during a major show of paintings by Bridget Riley in 1971 Rileys are indeed difficult for many people to look at. Yet if one of their functions is to make people uncomfortable, and even ill, then they can only be considered "good design" in some abstract, drawing-board way.Striped and certain types of swirling patterns, as Wilkins proves, can cause severe visual disturbance.