Project Details
Description
This PhD project relates to the interdisciplinary research area within Foodscapes recently established at Aalborg University. The project takes its point of departure in the current development and building of Danish “Super Hospitals” and the growing interest from an architectural point of view in how to design these hospitals to improve and optimize the healing process of the patients. Relative hereto, the project focuses on the specific possibility of utilizing architectural design to help improve patient heal-ing and decrease patient malnutrition, by designing better patient dining facilities. The project works with the hypothesis that a meal is an event concerning more than just eating and obtaining the right amount of nutrition. Eating and having a meal is a so-cial and cultural act impacting on our general wellbeing. It is an event staging a cer-tain meal experience and the project therefore speculates that the architectural set-tings framing the meal situation possibly play an important indirect part in the general wellbeing, the overall health and recovery process of the patients.
This understanding is based on a broader holistic perspective on hospital treatment and meal science, and a phenomenological and semiotic philosophical basis consid-ering physical, psychological, cultural, and social aspects of being-in-the-world, of eating, and of experiencing architecture.
However, sparse knowledge on this area exists in architectural research and in hospi-tal design practice today. The expected outcome of the PhD project is therefore to establish common ground on research in Hospital Foodscape Design, and as part hereof develop empirical knowledge and formulate basic theoretical conceptions of how the architectural context possibly impact on human eating and nutritional wellbe-ing, as well as using this knowledge to develop some basic design guidelines on how to design future patient dining facilities.
This understanding is based on a broader holistic perspective on hospital treatment and meal science, and a phenomenological and semiotic philosophical basis consid-ering physical, psychological, cultural, and social aspects of being-in-the-world, of eating, and of experiencing architecture.
However, sparse knowledge on this area exists in architectural research and in hospi-tal design practice today. The expected outcome of the PhD project is therefore to establish common ground on research in Hospital Foodscape Design, and as part hereof develop empirical knowledge and formulate basic theoretical conceptions of how the architectural context possibly impact on human eating and nutritional wellbe-ing, as well as using this knowledge to develop some basic design guidelines on how to design future patient dining facilities.
| Status | Finished |
|---|---|
| Effective start/end date | 01/08/2009 → 08/04/2013 |