Author:

Keywords:

Science & Technology, Technology, Engineering, Multidisciplinary, Ergonomics, Engineering, C3/19/032#55510259

Abstract:

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.