Impact of Architectural Design on Prisoners’ Well-being and Rehabilitation in the Netherlands

This thesis investigates how the design of prisons affects the rehabilitation of prisoners. It focuses on the Dutch prison system while drawing comparisons with Norway’s progressive approach. The study analyzes how the environment within prisons affects the well-being of inmates and their potential for reintegration into society. It examines the...

Doctor In Development: Designing education enabling medical students to include their personal identity in the process of becoming a professional

The national and international healthcare systems are in a transition. The healthcare problems of the future ask for doctors who can deal with complex challenges, connect to their patients, support societal health, have skills for lifelong learning, and take care of themselves (Lemmens et al., 2019; Nooteboom et al., 2020; World Health...

Prana: your luminous meditation assistant: An exploration of light as a supportive medium for meditation

This project is an exploration of light as a supportive medium for meditation. Light is a mysterious phenomenon and the possibilities are endless, which required a broad exploration of various elements and applications of light. With a design driven approach this exploration took many forms. Ranging from finding inspiration, sketching ideas and...

Mental Healtch Sanatorium

Our studio work focused on the facility of the City Hotel and ways of collective living, taking into account the Doughnut Economy model, which aims to end human deprivation and environmental changes. The task creates an opportunity to investigate a tremendously underappreciated topic of mental health. In consequence, my design will contribute to...

The Multi-Farm: Harvesting for improved ecology & mental health

The Multi-farm was designed in such a way that it forms a valuable link in a new neighbourhood's (in the Cornelis-Douwes 01 area in Amsterdam) social and ecological system. In the research strategies were developed for a decentral organisation of local foodproduction and waterpurification in a new neighbourhood, but the research also provided...

Dutch and American mental health hospitals in the reconstruction years (1945 - 1970)

This research has focused on the similarities and differences in the relevant socio-cultural influences and the organization of characteristic mental healthcare facilities for the Netherlands and the United States in the period from 1945 to 1970. Starting with the socio-cultural changes from this period for the Netherlands and the United States,...

A Serious Game for the well-being of CSN parents

Many parents of Children with Special Needs (CSN parents) struggle with finding the right balance in their life between doing all their responsibilities, taking care of their child with special needs and taking care of themselves. As a result, they take less care of themselves, by eliminate their needs. Therefore, the aim was to design a serious...

Chachat: 
towards a design to support Chinese young adults’ mental health during quarantine in corona crisis

This master graduation project was started from the current issue - COVID 19 crisis, explored a special context - the first quarantined city, Wuhan. The main purpose of this project is to get deeper understanding of the people who were quarantined at home for long time, and try to use interactive design to help them improve their mental states...

Explore embodied interactions to help people reduce worries and improve their well-being: Design for worrying

Many people experience worry once in a while. Chronic worry can have a severe impact on people's daily life. Many things, like health conditions, social relationships, sleep quality, and work performance, are all influenced by worrying [Joseph 2017]. So, this is something we would like to address. This assignment aims to explore embodied...

To be or not to be - Housing for homeless terminal people: Addressing Dutch healthcare provision and homelessness by redefining shelter design

People share a deep-seated need for a 'sense of home'. It is an intangible, psychological and sociological need that is projected on, and connected to the Built Environment (Rennels & Purnell, 2017; Dovey, 1985). Many people in western societies meet their 'sense of home' through traditional housing. Yet, there is a small marginalized group...

Future Chinese Migration and Emotional Care: WeChat Based Mini-Program Solution for Mental Care Service and Toolkit to Help Cope with Loneliness

For the migrants who left the place they were anchored to, the meaning of resettling is much more than the physical transition from one place to another. The journey of migration is also a process of transformation, during which people went through the self-deconstruction and reshape on many levels. For those who went across borders to the...

Transforming a monumental farm ensemble into a Mental Health Centre for students: A design for the transformation of the Hammen Farm on the TU Delft campus into a place for mental health and mental health awareness for TU Delft students and staff

The Hammen farm is a monumental farm ensemble located on the TU Delft campus. The farm has not been in use for years, and is in need of a new function. Another issue on campus is the growing amount of mental health related problems students are dealing with. In an effort to reduce this issues, and provide the students with the care they need,...

Adapt to scale: A framework to scale Inuka to new contexts

One in four people in the world will be affected by mental or neurological disorders at some point in their lives (WHO, 2001). Around 450 million people currently suffer from such conditions, placing mental disorders among the leading causes of ill- health and disability worldwide, in particular in low-income countries, where many barriers to...

Healing Landscapes: A Laboratory of well-being in an ex-psychiatric hospital in Florence

This research project focuses on the recognition that the surrounding environment affects people’s health and well-being. Bridging architecture and neuroscience, it is possible to demonstrate how space in its broad meaning affects biologically and psychologically humans; therefore this thesis investigates the application of findings from...

Embodied Conversational Agent for Mental Health Intervention

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) seek to provide a more natural means of interaction for a user through verbal and non-verbal properties of human face-to-face communication. For this reason, these systems are found to bring benefits in different mental health related interventions. However, a key challenge in developing agents to replace the...

Hybrid Business Model for the Dutch Mental Care of 2030

This project’s research question is: How is society able to organize a mental healthcare system, that serves people’s individual care needs and is collectively economically viable? This research question regards a business model on a system level and the hybridity is reflected in the tension between the individual interest of fulfilling a care...

Self-help card to support mental health of people on the move in Mexico: To increase the impact of the current intervention of Médicos Sin Fronteras

In Central America, the migrant crisis has grown more complicated over past years. It is estimated that about 500,000 migrants cross Mexican border every year. Most of the population is escaping from the extreme violence in the countries known as the Northern Triangle of Central America - Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. The highest homicide...