Outside Space
no art installations or sculptures or phone boxes or bus stops. In fact, the garden was typically domestic in feel and scale; a washing line in one area, scruffy lawn underneath, bird feeders, and some familiar plants like lavender and rosemary and wallflowers, but it didn’t seem to matter. Or rather, this was actually good enough.
WHAT DO WE DO NOW? We were faced with a stark choice: to give up at this point and go back to our sector with the news that a designer (or new garden design) is not necessary in creating a well-used outside space around a care setting, or to carry on, with all the impacts this step into the unknown would have on our time, capacity, and modest resources.
If we were going to corroborate our experiences from our very first site visit, we needed to carry on. To give up now would be to know what the answer was not, rather than what it was. We decided to follow the trail of evidence in front of us, and crossed the threshold inside the care setting. By observing behaviour and practices across the whole of the care setting both indoors and outdoors, we drew increasingly on our other skillsets as the research deepened. All our previous career paths (from the NHS and the armed forces, management, and training) joined up intuitively and naturally to help us understand the key role of care culture and management practices, as much as the condition of the garden and the features in it that aided or hindered engagement with the outside space.
During our site visits, it was plain that some of the most active engagement with the outside space occurred in care settings that had neither the most money available, nor the prettiest gardens. Here facilities were using what they already had, in many cases to great effect. As garden designers this was an eye-opener that changed our understanding of our role in the care sector. If this was taking place, then there surely had to be very good reasons to bring in a garden designer at all.
OUTSIDERS’ VIEW
As outsiders, we were also perhaps better placed to see things that didn’t add up or make sense than some of those inside the care setting itself. A suggestion to rearrange the chairs to face outwards and towards the lovely garden had immediate and positive outcomes for the residents and the staff in that particular setting. Were we providing garden design support? Indirectly, yes. We found that it helps to encourage a visit to the garden if the resident can actually see it. These and other suggestions to make small changes to layout and care practices that cost nothing or very little can be all that is needed to help a resident engage with the outdoor space more actively and more often.
A SPECTRUM OF CARE PRACTICES Winter 2013 and early 2014 were taken up with intense bouts of data analysis: recording, organising, and sifting information and evidence for emerging themes and patterns. Slowly, through a process that included intense
‘The home liked to keep the weeds, as they found them useful with some residents’
discussions, doodling, sketching, ‘mind- mapping’, and other graphical approaches across ten flipchart sheets, we reached a natural close. It was clear that the care setting culture (its ways of doing things) was a significant factor in engagement levels with the outside space, regardless of its condition, appearance, or design. We had been right to step inside the care setting to observe this at work when we widened our research scope several months earlier. We then plotted all the different interactions we had gathered along a ‘care-culture spectrum’ towards increasingly relationship-centred care at the top. From our observations, we could see other
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pineapplecontracts.com THE NETWORK Ap r i l 2 016 25
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