Understanding complex topics, such as the design of healthcare facilities, can be difficult for students, many of whom have had little or no experience with such environments. Thus, many Interior Architecture professors take their students on site visits to locations where they can broaden and deepen their understanding of client and users needs. One such visit took our students to various healthcare facilities here on campus.
The first site visit, looking into one of the 3 typologies (preventative care), they visited the College of Nursing and Health Science Center on Campus. Located in Academic Health Center 3 building, they toured the STAR Center on the third floor. This Simulation Teaching and Research (STAR) Center, provided nursing students with a new way of learning. Interacting with mannequins that can behave as a humans can, really helps them when it comes to real world experience.
Interior Architecture students were given a tour around the third floor STAR center learning about the equipment that is needed in these type of facilities and asking questions about what can be done to improve the psychical health of our society through their projects. They finished the tour by viewing the documentary “Supersize Me”, on the destruction that fast food can have on the human body, to get a sense on what they can do about this new kind fast-pace society.
