When in a hospital environment, whether for medical consultation, visiting a loved person, or even starting a new job, many people might experience stress and frustration. Those negative feelings and emotions impact well-being and are not necessarily or solely the consequence of the motive people go to the hospital. The experience of people needing help finding their way through the hospital campus or buildings instigates those feelings. Although many healthcare environments and hospitals often invest a lot of money and effort to implement a proper signage system, as it represents one of the critical aspects of their "identity", many challenges remain. A good wayfinding strategy is fundamental to all users involved in the daily functioning of a healthcare environment, as it can dramatically impact their well-being. In this paper, we highlight the importance of wayfinding as a crucial element for a comfortable hospital atmosphere and, consequently, a positive experience for the public. We illustrate our point of view by discussing the applied methodology to gain insight into the wayfinding system of a Belgian hospital to nurture the design process of developing a new wayfinding strategy for this client. We highlight different perspectives considering the understanding of various user groups and their difficulties and challenges encountered when trying to find their way in hospitals: the public, the architecture, the local culture, complex buildings and sites, stress and vulnerability of the people, routes and many other aspects. Together, these insights nurtured the strategy and design of an effective wayfinding system for the concerned healthcare facility.

This article aims to explore the critical incident technique as a useful method to understand the impact of healthscapes on patient experience. More specifically, we identify elements of the maternity healthscape that affect patient experience in a positive or negative way. In this respect, 39 in-depth interviews were conducted with various maternity stakeholders—mothers, midwives, heads of midwives, and senior managers. As the journey of (soon-to-be) mothers is technically and emotionally complex, and as many critical touchpoints must be managed care-fully to ensure a smooth experience, the key challenge during the interviews was to find a way to directly and indirectly discuss healthscape elements influencing the patient journey with the interviewees. Therefore, the authors explore the potential gains of the critical incident technique for architectural research.

A large majority of older people wish to live in non-institutionalized housing for as long as possible. However, current homes are generally not suitable for later life, leading us to rethink our living environments to support health and wellbeing. Architects, in that regard, have a key role to play. Yet, to date, they seem to have a limited knowledge of emotion-related users’ preferences, which could be the consequence of a frequent lack of care perspectives in design teaching, as well as a difficulty to pick up and translate research findings into practice. This study therefore sought to understand how (interior) architecture students design housing that facilitates ageing well in place, when they are prompted to consider older people’s needs/aspirations more holistically. We conducted design exercises with 16 students from two architecture schools and we fed their reflections with “theoretical key themes” and “personas”. These inputs were nurtured by a literature review on “ageing well in place” and focus groups organized with multidisciplinary experts. At the end of the exercise, the students completed a questionnaire to summarize their design considerations. The results focus on the preeminent spatial features designed by students to meet inhabitant’s needs, as well as some pedagogical aspects of the workshops. The paper finally concludes by recommandations to train future architects to design living environments with an eye for ageing well in place.

The physical character of a palliative environment can (when well-designed) positively impact the wellbeing and experiences of its various users (residents, family, caregivers, and volunteers). However, it seems difficult for architects to translate quite abstract and subjective multi-user perspectives into more specific applicable design solutions, which is why the impact of palliative research in architectural practice seems little so far. To contribute to closing the loop between architects' design intent and actual users' experiences, conducting qualitative interviews with users of palliative environments seems a plausible approach to understand how they experience these environments. However, this concerns several ethical and practical challenges regarding the participants, the context, and the topic of this research. Hence, tension seems present between collecting more applicable architectural richer experiences and ensuring that this research does not unnecessarily burden participants. Therefore, this paper will focus on (1) how we can con-tribute to the participant-researcher dialogue in order to elicit more architecturally rich (subjec-tive) experiences from various users of palliative environments, and (2) how we can adopt a human-centred approach when designing and conducting interviews of varioususers with(in) a palliative environment. For this purpose, a pilot study with three participants of a small-scaled palliative environment in Belgium was carried out to explore the potential and approach of pho-to-elicitation interviews. This paper reports on the pilot study and highlights methodological strengths and challenges from the lens of an architect-researcher with a strong focus on human-centredness. In this way, we hope to contribute to (re)designing more human-centred pal-liative environments.