Lecture: Engaging children in built environment research

Our perspectives on the nature of childhood and our understanding of individual children fundamentally influence when, why and how we work with children. This lecture will consider what happens when we approach children as competent commentators on their own lives, able and willing to contribute to our understanding of the built environment and, particularly, of the hospitals that we provide for them.

Drawing upon data generated with children in studies conducted within diverse children’s hospital facilities in the UK, it will consider what matters to children, how they experience aspects of the built environment of the hospital and what we, as adults, sometimes get wrong.

About Penny Curtis

Penny is Professor of Child and Family Health and Wellbeing in the School of Nursing and Midwifery, University of Sheffield, UK. She also directs the University of Sheffield´s interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth. Penny is closely involved in research and teaching relating to the health and the wellbeing of children, young people and families. Utilising participatory methods in order to facilitate the active involvement of children, her research has examined children´s experiences of hospitals with a particular focus on the built environment, hospital design and décor. Penny has been awarded a 2017 Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship to explore Arts for Health in children’s hospitals in Australia and New Zealand.

This lecture is support by Lyons Architecture.