Making Spaces for Staff Breaks: A Design Anthropology Approach

Abstract

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.