Interaction on Ward 8: Physical Settings and Behavioral Change

Abstract

A process of participatory design–in which users of the ward environment, staff and patients, influenced the outcome–was initiated on Ward 8 at Cleveland State Hospital, an old Kirkbride-modeled mental hospital where several experimental ward environments were created by ARC (Architecture-Research-Construction), an interdisciplinary team of designers and social scientists who researched, designed, built, evaluated and documented the new ward settings. At the end of that process, interaction–one observable category of ward activity–was more than doubled among a group of 22 long-institutionalized patients over a 16-month period, as observed and measured by “behavioral mapping,” a technique for studying influences of immediate environments on the behavior of groups.