Elke Miedema PhD
As an architect, researcher, educator (and building engineer) I love complexity and empowerment as part of design, research and education. This personal portfolio website showcases an overview of my work. – Elke
Current Activities
Currently I am working as a postdoc and educator at Chalmers University of Technology at the department of Architecture & Civil Engineering. My main research focus is on Sustainable Hospital Architecture and am involved in multiple studies about health-outcomes, diverse user needs and building design as situated in hospitals and healthcare, offices, and universities. The education includes being the course leader of Architectural Tranformation and Environmental Care; a master course of 22,5 credits running twice a year as well as tutoring in other courses relating to tranformation, architectural research and healthcare design. Meanwhile I have started looking what projects I want to involve myself in after next summer when I plan to move back to the Netherlands.
Popular summary of my PhD research
June 2020, I defended my PhD thesis in Architecture titled ‘Health-Promotive Building Design – Exploring perspectives on building design for health promotion in healthcare settings’. Here you can find the popular science summary.
It was already known that the design of hospitals is important for healthcare. Plus, the built environment is important for a society that focuses on health promotion. However, this thesis showed that it is not clear what health promotion means in the field of healthcare building design. The results also showed that it is unclear, for people who work with health promotion in healthcare, how the built environment can contribute to health promotion. This makes it difficult to understand as a designer what you should think of in terms of health promotion. This can even lead to buildings that hinder health promotion approaches in the future.
The dissertation collected different ideas about the design of health-promoting hospitals. More precisely, we have studied health promotion and care architecture as presented in the literature and with people involved in a building design project. The studies shows health promotion, in relation to health promotion in healthcare, can mean many different things. For example health promotion can refer to stimulating healthy behaviours, such as physical activity, social interaction or healthy nutrition. The health-promotive design of the building then could mean attractive and visible stairs, diverse spaces to socialise, or education kitchens to lear to cook a healthy meal. Below you can find a short explainer video of some of my work.
This research is particularly important now as many healthcare buildings need to be renovated or rebuilt, often with public funds. This makes it important to publicly discuss what these healthcare buildings should look like, how they can support healthcare, and how they can contribute to healthier communities. The primary audience are the people who are involved in the design of healthcare buildings. The results can support people who work with health promotion to incorporate the built environment in their ideas. The results hopefully result in improved healthcare buildings that play a role in the development of healthier communities. Future research should focus on the testing these health-promotive perspectives and linking them to different building design approaches.
The research was financed by FORMAS, part of AIDAH project (2013-2019) and in collaboration with the Centre for Healthcare Architecture.
