The Leuven Centre for Health Humanities (LCH²) cordially invite you to an exciting lecture entitled ‘The Roles of Cancer Care Facilities in Users’ Well-being: Foregrounding the Built Environment and Learning Lessons for Design’. It will be given by expert Pleuntje Jellema.
Date and Time
13 February 2025, from 16:00 to 17:15 (Europe/Brussels)
Location
Aula Emma Vorlat, Edward Van Evenstraat 4, 3000 Leuven
Online via Zoom
About the lecture
Every day, many people receive a cancer diagnosis, impacting them and their loved ones. Consultations and treatments lead to stress and uncertainty, and the built environment plays a role in this, affecting well-being. This talk explores how the experiences of those affected by cancer can inform the design of cancer care environments. Various methods are used to understand the built environment’s role in patients' everyday lives and to guide architects and clients in designing these facilities. Findings show that patients experience a dispersed landscape of care that consists of various locations and buildings, including their homes. This research further identifies spaces of transition as being at risk of receiving deficient attention in design processes for (cancer) care. If design processes are to take into account spatial aspects of people’s experiences, this requires making these aspects explicit and disentangling patients’ priorities from those of care professionals. I therefore illustrate how, with this type of research, clients and designers are supported in design processes, with examples from the broader care sector.
About the expert
Pleuntje Jellema is a qualitative design researcher within Research[x]Design at KU Leuven’s Department of Architecture. She studied Human Geography at the University of Amsterdam; Environmental Design at the Ontario College of Art & Design; and Interior Architecture at KU Leuven, where she received her PhD in Architecture in 2020. At the interface of research and design, she has conducted research for care organisations embarking on new construction projects and has co-supervised design studios within the Interior Architecture program. Her research foregrounds spatial aspects of experience with a particular interest in (health) care contexts, interior environments, and inclusive design.