Since the turn of the century we see a renewed interest in the impact of hospital environments on children's well-being. With policy largely built around adult assumptions, knowledge about these environments from young people's perspectives is limited. Participatory visual research is considered helpful to explore people's perspectives in other than solely verbal ways. Conducting it with children in sensitive and hard-to-enter contexts like hospital wards, however, poses important ethical questions. Discussions tend to contrast procedural ethics with ethics in the field, showing how the former are unfitted for this kind of research. This paper takes a more constructive approach by reflecting on what we can learn from these ethical encounters while preparing and conducting a pilot study. We argue that exploring, rather than closing, the experienced gap between design research and healthcare ethical protocols establishes a shared space of reflection that offers a stepping stone to link both.
Since the turn of the 21st century we see a renewed interest in the impact of hospital environments on children's well-being. In this article, we study the spatiality of children affected by cancer, i.e., their encounters with the day-care ward they are situated in. First we elaborate on these encounters through Schatzki's practice theory and Gibson's theory of affordances. Then we clarify our thinking in a case study and turn as empirical focus to a 'thing', an intravenous-pump and stand (IV-stand). The data used are field notes and videos shot by two children in a day-care ward, tinged with examples from literature and coincidental encounters with the IV-stand. Through carefully untangling everyday practices around the IVstand, we show their complexity and offer a more nuanced understanding of child-friendly environments.
Research that aims to support human-centred architectural design increasingly recognizes people as everyday designers. What remains unclear, however, is how architects can design in ways that support everyday design. We addressed this question in a one-week course in architectural engineering. The course started from a real-world design brief -the redesign of a child oncology ward -and combined design exercises with lectures, discussions with various experts, observational exercises in a school, and watching together a TV-documentary to gain insight into the design of care environments and children's everyday practices. As data we use individual and group student work and as themes for analysis we select lessons learned and design interventions suggested by the students in relation to the question we started from. As implications we emphasize attention for people's involvement in practices as strategy in designing for everyday designers, integrating possibilities for user-feedback as part of design proposals in architectural education, and TV-documentaries as possible source of information in designing for sensitive and hard-to-enter contexts like hospital wards.
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