About IDRP

Editorial Introduction to IDRP Volume I, Issue I:
Focus on Design and Health

We are pleased to issue our first edition of the Interdisciplinary Design and Research e-Publication (IDRP).

Our invited article is "Healing Gardens in Hospitals," by Clare Cooper Marcus. Professor Marcus provides a well-documented account of the therapeutic efficacy of gardened environments. This typology is exemplary in showing how design research can inform and alter received design practice. As such, Professor Marcus's article is apropos in our four accepted articles in this issue:The common thread in all four of these articles is how a commonly received point of view may need to be re-visited under the scrutiny of finer-grained design research or critical inquiry.

Patricia Manual’s "Where's the Rough-and-Tumble" challenges the assumption that planning—even sensitive planning—can accommodate the needs of children’s play and, by extension, foster children’s health, and hence the health of future adults. She argues for the retention of raw nature in our communities for this purpose, whether large or small. Not all healthy activities need to be planned activities, and Manual holds that, when it comes to children’s health by means of play, raw nature can do a better job than we give it credit for.

Mary Stankos and Benyamin Schwarz, in "Evidence-Based Design in Healthcare," invite a closer look at whether or not the principles of Evidenced-Based Medicine (EBM) can be harnessed for Evidence-Based Design (EBD). There is increasing interest in the design fields, perhaps under the banner of interdisciplinary praxis, to mix and match different ways of knowing to further design knowledge. But the concerns Stankos and Schwarz raise return us again to the question of just how different design knowledge is, in comparison to more empirically based fields of inquiry. In this vein, this article also contains some even-handed critique of the work of our invited author, Clare Cooper-Marcus, on her research in healing gardens.

In "Perceptions of Independent Living," Jennifer Webb, Korydon Smith and Brent Williams assess environmental limitations through the eyes of persons with disabilities. Their paper underlines the need for design practitioners who themselves do not suffer from disabilities to be educated on the gap between physical environments and their perceptual fit for disabled users. This user population is much larger than what is conventionally understood.

This leads right to our student project, "Ceramic Tactile Guides for the Kamppi Centre in Helsinki Finland." Milla Ahti, Helka Karjalainen, Everiina Salomaa report precisely the kind of learning Webb and her co-authors call for: educating designers to design for disability informed by the “expertise” of those with sight impairments. As this article is released, the Kamppi guide project has been installed and in use for two years, to reports of good success not only in terms of what it was designed to do, but also as a means of on-going education for all users.

ISSN: 1939-4659. Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Design Institute of Washington State University.

The Design Institute is a center where faculty, practitioners, undergraduate as well as graduate students in Architecture, Interior Design, and Landscape Architecture come together to learn in an interdisciplinary setting, to share ideas, and to grow in ability to practice and research in the design fields.