Health Care Environments

Anyone involved with the design of healthcare environments, particularly those to be used by children and adolescents, should review the case study at the website below, which focuses on a children’s hospital in Sydney, Australia.  By studying children and adolescents in the hospital, the researchers “identified a range of factors key to improving their experience in the healthcare environment.”  Their report is too rich to adequately summarize in a posting here.

Research conducted by Sreedhari Desai and Francesca Gino confirms the importance of the nonverbal cues we find in our physical environment.  They found that “Adults are less likely to cheat and more likely to engage in ‘pro-social’ behaviors when reminders of children, such as teddy bears and crayons, are present.”  When asked to discuss the research, Desai responded that “Child-related cues might unconsciously activate notions of goodness and drive us to get to a pure state and not want to pollute it

Recent research links traveling through doorways and forgetting.  Researchers linked passing through doorways with forgetting thoughts, decisions, and actions.

The Center for Health Design has prepared a glossary of healthcare design terms.  It was developed with a clear objective: “to capture in a single document the environmental variables used in healthcare studies, their definitions (conceptual and operational, if provided by the authors), tools and measures used in the studies, and the sources and validation studies associated with such tools and measures, where available.” The glossary is available at the web address noted below. 

Costa investigated the tendency of people to sit in the same seat each time they are in a public space.  His research was conducted in academic buildings, but it is applicable in a range of other settings such as workplace conference rooms.  As Costa states, “students choose the same seat over time in university classrooms.

Recent research indicates that brief, brisk (but not running) walks can enhance our ability to remember things.  Designers can respond to this research by creating galleries and similar spaces which allow people to walk quickly (without running) immediately before doing tasks requiring memory.  Salas and his colleagues found that “individuals can gain a memory advantage from a 10-minute walk before studying.”  Study participants walked down several flights o

Seating options provided make it more likely that people will sit with good or bad posture, and recent research indicates that posture is particularly important in healthcare settings.  Bohns and Wiltermuth determined that participants in their study “who adopted dominant poses displayed higher pain thresholds than those who adopted submissive or neutral poses.”  In this case, dominant posture meant sitting up straight, just as your mother encouraged you to sit.

Researchers at the Kellogg School of Management (Adam Galinksy and Li Huang) have found that “when bodily expressions are in conflict with one’s actual feelings . . . people become more likely to accept and embrace atypical ideas.”  The details of one of the studies constructed suggest ways that designers might apply this finding in spaces where service developers will brainstorm, for example: “Some participants were made managers and others subordinates. . . .