Everyday comforting practices in psychiatric hospital environments: A design anthropology approach.

What Is Known On The Subject: Comfort as a conceptual and lived experience is essential in psychiatric hospital contexts and for overall mental health wellbeing. Comfort is a valuable aspect when designing hospitals and built environments for psychiatric care.

What The Paper Adds To Existing Knowledge: This article presents the results from a Design Anthropology study at four Psychiatric Units co-located in a newly built regional hospital based on 126 ethnographic interviews with staff, within which 63 participants mentioned the importance of comfort in generating environments conducive to wellbeing.

Making Spaces for Staff Breaks: A Design Anthropology Approach.

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.

Going forward through the world: thinking theoretically about first person perspective digital ethnography.

Engaging first person perspective recording as a type of digital ethnography invites the question of how we might understand the status of the knowledge it produces. To examine this question I will focus on how first person perspective camera recordings might be engaged and made analytically meaningful in disciplines where naturalistic and observational visual recording is uncommon and where the idea of producing naturalistic or optimally objective visual recordings of people's lives is problematized. In doing so I explore the wider possibilities of these technologies for ethnographic research both beyond their existing uses and for interdisciplinary research where the images they produce might be analysed from more than one perspective.