Purpose: This article proposes and demonstrates a design anthropological approach to hospital design and architecture and engages this approach to advance recent discussions of the question of designing for staff breaks. Background: We respond to calls for attention to sensory and experiential dimensions of hospital architecture and design through social science approaches and to research into the sensory environments for staff breaks. Method: Design anthropology enables us to surface the experiential and unspoken knowledge and practice of hospital staff, which is inaccessible through conventional consultations, quantitative post-occupancy evaluation surveys, or traditional interviews. We draw on ethnographic research into the everyday experience, improvisatory activity, and imagined futures of staff working in the psychiatric department of a large new architecturally designed hospital in Australia. Results: We argue that while the sensory aspects of hospital design conventionally cited—such as light and green areas—are relevant, attention to staff priorities that emerge in practice reveals that well-being is contingent on other qualities and resources. Conclusions: This suggests a refocus, away from the idea that environments impact on staff to create well-being, to understanding how staff improvise to create environments of well-being. We outline the implications of this research for an agenda for design for well-being in which architects and designers are often constrained by generic design briefs to argue for a shift in policy that attends more deeply to staff as future users of hospital designs.
This paper contributes to the current discourse on the role of artefacts in facilitating and triggering interaction among people. The discussion will focus on artefacts used as part of an interview method developed in order to discover knowledge that was observed but absent from both project reports and other documentation within multidisciplinary collaborative research projects, located within the field of Interaction Design. Using artefacts in an interview context enabled participants to reveal insights that were, in turn, participatory and human-centred. Thus the method was effective and appropriate in illuminating knowledge situated in interaction. This ethnomethodological tool enabled participants to reflexively externalize their understanding of the complex interactions that occur within projects, encouraging participation, interaction, visualization, reflection and communication through the use of tools aimed at capturing and illuminating the lived experiences of human engagement. These interviews were conducted with a selection of participants, chosen because they were researchers, working together within a cooperative research centre. Keywords: best practices, consultancy, critical systems, theory, user-centered design (UCD) Keywords: design methodology, ethnomethodology, interaction design, playful triggers This study draws from our exploration of an interview method that uses artefacts to elicit information, and was employed to illuminate knowledge built among collaborators. That knowledge, embedded in multidisciplinary interaction design practice, was absent from project reports. In order to identify this missing information, we explored the use of artefacts based on Playful Triggers (Loi, 2005) This case study involved 11 interviews with project participants within a funded research centre. These interviews were not intended to be a comprehensive survey of the research projects themselves, but rather to explore the various roles involved in interaction, as well as the experiences of collaborators through a representative sample of different projects. The intention was to illuminate human interactions, which are situated in practice (Suchman, 1987), in order to discover knowledge that was observed but absent from written documentation.In this work, we first provide background on the research centre's projects along with a critique of their documentation procedures. We also develop the rationale for this interview method within that particular context. Second, we discuss the origins of the artefacts used in the interviews and how the use of these artefacts draws on work developed by Loi (2005) as well as Akama's 1 ongoing research, and the work of other researchers (Arias & Fischer, 2000; Gaver et al., 1999;Sanders, 2000). Examples and visuals drawn from our case study demonstrate how these artefacts were used in accessing and communicating implicit knowledge embedded in human interaction within design projects. Finally, we will discuss why the adaptation of Playful Triggers was an appropriate ethno...
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