Designwire Daily: from the editors of Interior Design magazine

AAHID and Nurture Name Graduate Research Grant Winner

by Nicholas Tamarin | Friday, July 16, 2010

Chia-Hui Wang

The American Academy of Healthcare Interior Designers and healthcare furnishings manufacturer Nurture by Steelcase are awarding their second annual Graduate Research Fellowship to Chia-Hui Wang.

Wang is considered one of the pioneers performing evidence-based design research in the field of healthcare architecture in Taiwan and the author of over 60 publications, including journal articles, conference papers, and technical reports. Her research interests include healthcare architecture, long-term care facility design, and justice architecture.

Her experience should mesh well with the program, which was created to promote the importance of interior design research and to contribute to the body of knowledge for healthcare interior design as well as to show how research and evidence-based design to change the way people experience healthcare environments. The fellowship is designed to assist new investigators in initiating the research aspect of their education by providing seed money to afford graduate students the opportunity to pursue new or novel areas of research. Earlier this year, the AAHID announced that Nurture agreed to continue its support of the Graduate Research Fellowship for the next five years.

Wang’s research will focus on finding the best practice of designing nursing stations. She will explore the effects of physical design, specifically in terms of an innovatively designed decentralized nursing station, on staff communication as well as patient outcomes, with the goal of improving communication and patient outcomes in acute care.

Wang is a doctoral student in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s School of Architecture. She also works in Taiwan as an assistant professor in Hwa-Hsia Institute of Technology’s Department of Architecture, where she teaches courses in both architecture and law. She also co-teaches the Architectural Design of Healthcare Organizations course at Taipei Medical University.

“We are very pleased to award this fellowship to such an outstanding candidate,” says Jocelyn Stroupe, AAHID’s president. “The significance of the proposed research study by Ms. Wang, her qualifications, the clarity of her goals and her potential to make significant contributions to our industry in the future really made her the right choice in the selection committee’s mind.”

“I am truly humbled by AAHID’s and Nurture’s generosity and am also very excited about the opportunity to explore the impacts of architectural design on patient outcomes and communication as it relates to various nursing station designs,” adds Wang.