She is an architect and researcher with over 30 years experience in hospital design in Australia, New Zealand, East Timor and other countries. She founded the Australian Health Design Council in 2012 to provide networking opportunities and knowledge sharing between designers, clinicians, researchers and other interested professionals in the health architecture domain. She recently completed a Doctor of Creative Industries at Queensland University of Technology that investigated the role of user groups on healthcare projects in Australia and New Zealand.
I recently peer-reviewed an academic paper that explored how well architects and other designers understand and value ‘research’. The author also looked at the degree to which architects engage in or initiate research studies, and then apply original findings to their projects. Reading this paper led me to reflect on how architects define research, and the place of it within the myriad of other information sources that influence architectural work. It also led me back to some research that I conducted earlier in my academic career in conjunction with the then Royal Australian Institute of Architects that investigated the sources of information that architects preferred to use to support their practice.[1]
