ARCH22: Know More About the Conference

Architecture Research Care and Health

By working with Orvium, the 5th Architecture Research Care and Health conference was able to cover the whole publishing life cycle of 60 high quality research articles. From the call for paper to the reception of the different manuscripts by the editors, peer review and finally publish the articles directly under the conference community space in Orvium (link). Following a deep dive into the conference details.

"Enabling health, care and well-being through design research" is the theme of this year's ARCH22, which will be held from August 22 to 24. The aim of the conference is to bring together and connect researchers and professionals in health, real estate and design from various countries, to raise awareness of the new hospital environment and the most current new evaluation studies.

Due to the main theme of the conference, the papers that have been received and will be presented around the following topics:

• Theme 1: integrating needs: inclusive and integrated design that enables health, care and wellness.
• Theme 2: healthcare design and change: future-proofed, resilient and crisis-adapted design (before, after and now).
• Theme 3: Engagement: co-creation, co-design, design and stakeholder management processes.

Each of the above issues can be addressed from three different approaches.

• From the person: looking at the effect that real estate infrastructure can have on users, improving their experience in certain environments and the quality of life of those involved.
• From the place: where physical infrastructure, flexibility, and adaptability of a site would come into play (e.g. when dealing with a pandemic).
• From the process: where we talk about the design process with users, but also the use of support tools such as VR and BIM, the impact of IT and other technologies, and implementation stages.

Considering the topics to be addressed at the conference, the conference will be divided into the following blocks, which can be filtered on the conference page on the orvium platform:

• Inclusive design/health promotion,
• user needs,
• future-proofing, and
• engagement

In addition to the conference itself, there will also be research workshops and different opportunities to network with attendees, including a conference dinner and 3 different tours that help to learn more about the environment as well as the new hospital environment in Rotterdam. This is the main reason why ARCH21 was postponed to this year, with the intention of fostering these connections and getting to meet the people involved in person.

Speakers and Topics

During the conference, we will find different speakers in the different thematic blocks that will be developed. Among the different speakers, we will highlight the following:

• Prof. Marie Elf. She is a Professor of Nursing at Dalarna University, Falun in Sweden, and the leader of the research group Environment, Technology, and Participation. She has studied the relations between the built environment and health and wellbeing for over two decades. Her talk is entitled The known unknowns - moving evidence for healthcare environments. She will discuss the importance of infrastructure in healthcare environments, extending this improvement in care and experience into the home.
• Prof. Monique van Dijk, professor of Nursing Science at Erasmus MC. The title of her lecture is Nature and nurture in a new hospital, which deals with the new hospital and the impact the new structure has on different aspects related to patients and employees, and how different changes in the infrastructure can have positive impacts.
• Prof. Gesine Marquardt, in her academic and design work, she develops architectural concepts for the healthcare sector in a society impacted by demographic change. She will talk about the importance of architecture in different healthcare buildings, giving relevance to its construction and how it can help the recovery and improvement of patients' conditions, especially in the case of the elderly, in her talk Ageing & Architecture: Towards Research across Settings.
• Liesbeth van Heel (see profile), MSc, researcher Program Evaluation Our New Erasmus MC (PE-ONE) at Erasmus MC and TU Delft. Her paper entitled Stakeholder engagement as route to design quality talks about the different parties involved in the creation of infrastructure and the time it can take to implement it properly.