Designing Healthy Homes

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The 'Designing Healthy Homes' project is an investigation of the interaction between the design of the home and everyday practices of health and wellbeing.The home is conceptualised as both a technical envelope containing and protecting the occupants, and the socio-cultural creation of a special place. Theoretically, this rejects the dichotomy of house:home as a division between technical professionals and the experiences of everyday use. The project brings together both sides of this divide by facilitating a discussion around the design of a series of homes by the participants, based on experience rather than technical conventions.Participants will be carefully selected for their membership of one of three groups, each faced with the need to reconsider the relationship between their home and their daily wellbeing as a result of a recent or imminent transitional phase in their lives. Three or four participants from each of the three groups will be recruited through well connected non-academic partners, including a housing association and a team of occupational therapists. The first group will be households with a new-born baby; the second, individuals who have experienced debilitating illness or injury; and third, elderly people who are considering moving. These participants will each have particular ambitions and concerns for their domestic environment, brought into sharp perspective as a result of the need to reflect on a transitional life stage. Where possible, each participant household will be followed through their transition, by using innovative research methods that avoid the need for the researcher to be personally present in their home for long periods of time.A 'cultural probe' will be designed and left with each household as the means for them to record their thoughts and activities. This package of objects is intended to appeal to the curious and playful side of human nature, as a way of maintaining engagement with the research project. It will include for example, a digital camera, a house plan, a diary, a scrapbook and a series of thought-provoking activities for the participants to complete. This will then form the basis for a series of conversations where the householders will be able to query and clarify some of the deliberately ambiguous requests.While lengthy and intensive visits to a person's home are likely to be intrusive and unlikely to provide an accurate record of usual patterns of activity, regular shorter visits around targeted events are more easily accommodated. A series of agreed home visits over a period of a year or more will therefore be carried out at events such as mealtimes, family visits, morning routines etc. Along with the information from the cultural probe, this will provide the rich and detailed set of data characteristic of good social science research.As a key part of their engagement with this research, participants will be asked to reflect on their concept of a healthy home and produce a design through sketches, the scrapbook, and discussion. Each design will then be modelled for use in the University of Reading's CAVE - a 3D full-scale interactive virtual reality environment. The designers will be able to move around the home, and make adjustments to finishes, the position of furniture, lighting effects and so on. This will be combined with the less technical designs, including photographs, scrapbooks and diary entries as a holistic representation of a healthy home. Their designs will be presented to visiting industry professionals and healthcare practitioners, and will form the basis for discussions between the experienced participants and the technical experts.In this way, the project will facilitate user-engagement and conversations between lay people and nominal experts in a forum which privileges neither, in the hope that new insights into the relationship between the design of the home and practices of health and wellbeing can be better understood.