A Room of One's Own

This Research & Knowledge Exchange Doctoral Project brief summarises our priority areas of research interest under the heading of: A Room of One's Own. How participatory arts-based research in architecture, interior design and spatial planning can inform and enable a professionally sustainable and healthy workplace in institutional environments.

We welcome all research degree applications aligned with and in response to this brief.

The AD[A]PT (Architectural Design and Humanities Promoting Transformation) Consortium offers this PhD Studentship, funded through the inaugural Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Doctoral Training Focal Awards.

Lead image by Dr Sarah Riviere.

The essay A Room of One’s Own (Woolf, 1929) calls for the need for an allocated space in order to think, create, and, in Virginia Woolf’s case, to write. Within the fast-paced ever-changing environment of health care, spatial design plays an active role in the physical and mental health of the staff working within it (NHS England, 2025). The built environment can overwhelm with spaces as unacknowledged stressors that may disable thoughtful reflection and creativity. This proposal calls for a deeper exploration of architectural and interior spatial planning to address the human consequence on healthcare staff from the design and agency of their working spaces.

We welcome cross-disciplinary proposals that prioritise participatory, speculative, architectural and arts-based methodologies, that explore human-centred design and planning and/or capture lived experience through co-designed processes. The research potentially enables tangible impacts on improved mental health, creativity, productivity and well-being of members of our institutions, their teams and the communities they serve.

This brief has been nominated by the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust (RCHT) as a topic area they are keen to support by way of a Collaborative Doctoral Award. In your application responding to this brief, you should give consideration as to how your project will benefit from engagement with RCHT. This project would be co-supervised between staff at the School of Architecture, Design and Interiors at Falmouth University and staff at RCHT, and would involve a period of time based within the RCHT site.

Projects deriving from this brief are expected to sit within the Research & Knowledge Exchange strategy and the following department.

All successful research degree project proposals must emphasise a clear alignment between the project idea and our Research & Knowledge Exchange strategy.