Patients making place. A photography-based intervention about appropriation of hospital spaces

Hospitalised patients are faced with a brute reorientation of their normal spatial needs andpreferences and forced to adjust spatially to a new environment. Patients start to re-arrangetheir own situation according to personal needs and the site-specific circumstances. It is are-arrangement that includes furniture, private objects and spatial positioning, but also theadjustment to the presence and needs of the staff and other patients. What types of spatialand aesthetical preferences and actions emerge in this alignment with the hospital cultureand how can preferences and everyday spatial production by patients be investigated? Here,a methodological approach is suggested where patients look upon their stay at the hospitalby discussing photos that they have produced themselves while hospitalised and answers toa set of questions they have written on image cards produced by the researchers in orderto stimulate discussion. The investigation was carried out in 2012 at Helsingborg Hospitalin Sweden. It shows that patients are primarily concerned with spatial ordering within thehospital environment and less with decorative aesthetic aspects. The study also shows thatthe understanding of patients’ daily occupation with shared spaces, negotiable spaces anddelegated spaces would gain from further investigation of spatial appropriation and its relationto the existential necessity of spatial vagueness. In relation to this, we suggest that architecturalconsultation and environmental research could take into account a more varied range ofviews of space within the hospital environment, apart from already established categories orfunctions. It could be done, we suggest, practically as well as theoretically, by acknowledgingcertain qualities of vagueness in the continual everyday production of hospital space. Byallowing meetings and negotiation between otherwise separate, contradictory or completelyunheard opinions, this may in the end have a positive effect on future architectural outcomes.