Child Centric Healing Spaces

The 20th and the 21st century will be marked as the period in history when the world focused on creating child friendly environments. From education to healthcare, we have been striving to build a more empathetic and inclusive society for our children. In the last decade, paediatric healthcare has made giant strides in this direction. This unit focuses on sensitizing future designers to the needs of children while they are in a hospital. While maintaining the efficiency and functionality of the facility, solutions that address the mental well-being of the children need to be devised. Access to physical features and social situations that reduce their stress and develop a sense of control over privacy and self-efficacy are critical to healing. In recent years, our approach to paediatric healthcare design has evolved to designing engaging, participatory, social and more child centric environments. This studio aims to resolve complex issues through a well-defined design process. The students will learn tools and methods to enquire, assimilate, define, ideate and test; the key components of a design-based thinking. Healthcare design offers a unique opportunity to coalesce technology, functionality and above all empathy, to build humanitarian designs that touch lives in unique ways.