Making Spaces for Staff Breaks: A Design Anthropology Approach

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.