Abstract
Interacting with the outdoor environment has a positive impact on people's physical and mental health and well-being. Nevertheless, (health)care facilities are usually not designed for patients, residents, visitors, and staff to fully benefit from the opportunity to experience and use the outdoor environment. Physical, mental, and organisational obstacles impact on their interaction with the outdoor environment. These obstacles often relate to the design of in- and outdoor interior spaces, with the term "interior" referring to "with building qualities related to human dimensions and conditions." Those involved in designing interior spaces thus hold a major responsibility in creating them in such a way that they benefits patients', residents', visitors' and staff's health and well-being. A combination of design concepts that highlight the role of interior spaces in supporting patients', residents', visitors', and staff's interaction with the outdoor environment, and strategies on how to implement these concepts in designing healthcare facilities is needed.
Therefore, this project aims to investigate how to design (health)care facilities' in- and outdoor interior spaces to allow patients, residents, visitors, and staff to optimally benefit from the outdoor environment, and as such to contribute to their physical and mental health and well-being.
Following a design anthropology approach, the project connects the past, present, and future in a process of attuning people and environments. Past and present cases of (health)care facility that realised specific in- and outdoor interior spaces to improve patients', residents', visitors', and staff's interaction with the facility's outdoor environment, are studied through ethnography- and design-based methods. The cases on designs realised in the past will result in theoretical insights into how patients, residents, visitors, and staff experience and use in- and outside interior environments of (health)care facilities and how this impacts on their physical and mental health and well-being. The cases on ongoing designs will foreground how interaction with the outdoor environment is taken into account and materialised throughout the design process of in- and outdoor interior spaces. Finally, design workshops will allow to develop design concepts and strategies to facilitate the design of future (health)care facilities in which interaction with the outdoor environment is supported.
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