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The Pavement and the Hospital Bed: Care Environments as Part of Everyday Life KU Leuven
We start this invited perspective with two excerpts. The first is an advertisement for A+, a Belgian architecture journal, which devoted an issue to architecture for children to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the implementation of the Convention of the Rights of the Child. The second comes from the website of a Dutch architecture firm (LIAG) describing their acclaimed design of the Princess Máxima Pediatric Oncology Centre in Utrecht, ...
Weaving with design research to study children’s everyday practices in cancer care environments KU Leuven
Children affected by cancer often require repeated hospitalisations. The impact of the material hospital environment on children's well-being receives growing attention across various disciplines. Yet, because of their ‘double vulnerability’ – being children and being ill – young people affected by cancer are less considered as direct research participants. We set out to put the experiences of these children at the centre of attention. To do ...
Room for Vulnerability: Children’s Everyday Practices and the Design of Cancer Care Environments KU Leuven
Children affected by cancer often require repeated hospitalisations. As visits may extend over several months, the hospital becomes part of these children's and their families' everyday lives. Since the turn of the 21st century the impact of the material hospital environment on children's health and well-being receives heightened attention from researchers across various disciplines. The context of childhood cancer amplifies young people's ...
Interweaving vulnerability and everyday design: Encounters around an aquarium in a paediatric oncology ward KU Leuven
Contemporary understandings of vulnerability highlight its critical, relational and enabling aspects. Through leveraging these understandings, this article contributes to conceptualizing the notion of everyday design by interweaving it with that of vulnerability. A case study brings vulnerability into view by zooming out from and in on everyday practices around an aquarium in a paediatric oncology ward. Subsequently, we unravel the notion of ...
Reflections on Methods for Exploring Children’s Encounter with the Urban Environment KU Leuven
While children have as much right to the city as other people, spatialplanners tend to restrict children to child-specific places such as playgrounds. With an eye to designing cities as places for everyone, we explored together with children how they experience their city and what they think about it. In this paper we reflect on the use of research methods in our exploration. In our attempt to engage a group of 22 eight-year-olds, we used a ...
Exploring with Children What Makes a City Child-Friendly KU Leuven
In light of the 30th birthday of the Convention on the Rights of theChild, we explore what makes a city child-friendly. This question is often answered by adults rather than children themselves. Moreover, designing child-specific places tends to bring children out of view. With an eye to designing cities as places for everyone, including children, we explored together with them how they experience their city. Findings suggest that they find ...
Understanding children’s spatiality in cancer care environments: Untangling everyday practices around an IV-stand in a paediatric day-care ward KU Leuven
Since the turn of the 21st century we see a renewed interest in the impact of hospital environments on children’s well-being. In this article, we study the spatiality of children affected by cancer, i.e., their encounters with the day-care ward they are situated in. First we elaborate on these encounters through Schatzki’s practice theory and Gibson’s theory of affordances. Then we clarify our thinking in a case study and turn as empirical focus ...
Conversations between procedural and situated ethics: Learning from video research with children in a cancer care ward KU Leuven
Since the turn of the century we see a renewed interest in the impact of hospital environments on children’s well-being. With policy largely built around adult assumptions, knowledge about these environments from young people’s perspectives is limited. Participatory visual research is considered helpful to explore people’s perspectives in other than solely verbal ways. Conducting it with children in sensitive and hard-to-enter contexts like ...