Happy living environment for university students
Design of mentally supportive residential environment on campus
Y. SHEN (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
B Jürgenhake – Mentor (TU Delft - Public Building and Housing Design)
A.B.J. van Deudekom – Mentor (TU Delft - Teachers of Practice / AE+T)
Leo Oorschot – Mentor (TU Delft - Teachers of Practice / A)
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Abstract
This thesis states the current urgent problem in the global context where the prevalence of depression among university students is increasing. Most of the university students who suffer from depression due to peer competition, high demands on themselves, inability to handle relationships well and other problems leading them to feel helpless, upset and anxious. In the Netherlands, even with a complete psychiatric care system, depressed patients still have to face a lot of problems in terms of treatment, such as long waiting lists and expensive treatment. Therefore, an increasing number of people are motivated to concentrate on depression prevention.
About depression prevention, there have been some research and measures at the social level and psychological level. At the architectural level, most of the mental-related research has focused on medical buildings, with limited research on daily living environments. It is relevant
to combine depression prevention measures and architectural design measures for university students to research and design their daily living environment to positively support depression prevention. The targeted group is healthy university students. For these university students living in student residences on campus, campus and residence are the places that they spend much time. In order to investigate how the design of campus and residential spaces can support depression prevention, the design guidelines are generated through four research methods: literature research, observation, interview and case studies. The design guidelines are categorised into three levels of importance and two scales. Based on the design guidelines, the design (including campus scale and residence scale) will be done.
Overall, through the research process, the design guidelines relate to the three aspects of physical, social and mental health. This research argues that promoting these three aspects of healthy lifestyles among university students can contribute to depression prevention for them.