Light-Colour-Darkness
Reimagining the birth environment through aesthetics and phenomenology
Years ago, when I asked my own mother to tell me about my birth, she said, “I don’t remember anything, I was asleep!” Recently, during my doctoral research, I read stories of the powerful drugs used to achieve this “sleep” and the grey floppy babies that ensued. In the 1980s I had my own two children, in two different Ontario hospitals. I was keenly aware, and critical, of these two very clinical birth environments, because I was studying and then working in architecture at the time. There was an absence of architectural design in both spaces – no features or affordances (space, form, light, atmosphere, colour, views out, places to move or sit, bathing facilities) that could be experienced or felt as aesthetically pleasant, controllable, or even useful to me or my partner. There was one positive feature, a skylight, in a delivery room I was transferred into, and which I remember as offering great relief and pleasure – I could see the blue sky and early morning light. Today, I find that we have not gone far enough in challenging the medicalization of birth, and the related, clinical nature of birth spaces. Making them “home-like” is not enough. We need to reinvent them.
Ro & Bermudez1 have noted that most architectural researchers “focus on the cognitive rather than the affective, and the behavioural not the psychological […] anything that could be related to beauty, emotion, or spirituality is perceived controversial, ‘unscientific,’ or ‘subjective’ and is thus avoided by professionals and researchers.” Roger Ulrich famously conducted a study showing that surgical patients recovered more quickly in a room looking out to a view of a tree (rather than a brick wall).2 We seem to need such studies to validate the value of nature, of art, of beauty, of emotional design. In a 2008 review of evidence-based healthcare design research, Ulrich et al. concluded, “It is now widely recognized that well designed physical settings play an important role in making hospitals less risky and stressful, promoting more healing for patients and providing better places for staff to work.” How to achieve “well-designed physical settings” is the question that now remains to be answered.
My own work is focused specifically on the birth environment, but has value for other healthcare spaces. Aesthetic phenomenology, or how aesthetic experience impacts our body – our mind/body – is a primary aspect of my research. In seeking out birth environment literature, I found important new theory in Birth Territory and Midwifery Guardianship.3 The authors seek to definitively reset our focus, turning attention towards creating real change for birth by reconsidering the birth environment itself and how its attributes might influence the birthing body. The important point they make is that birthspace itself has impact on birth processes. Better birthspace could provide less medicalized birth experience, and physical aspects of the space, including light, colour, sounds, smells, privacy, flow, capacity to move, water, air, texture and sensuality are valuable allies in this design work.
It is clear today that mind/body/environment cannot be separated, as posited/discussed by early “embodiment” theorists Maurice Merleau-Ponty4 and James J. Gibson5. In my practice-based doctoral research project, light-colour-darkness emerged as an inseparable trio that engages our mind/body through the sensual materiality, flow of space and form, and atmospheric and temporal aspects of architectural space. Sensual, emotive and spiritually sensitive design can be utilized to reimagine the birth environment, and this is important for both birth experience and the longer-term health and wellbeing of all involved.
The process book for Light in the Reimagined Birth Environment can be seen at www.doreenbalabanoff.com and a lecture/seminar on the topic is forthcoming at an event sponsored by the Colour Research Society of Canada in fall 2017. Doreen Balabanoff recently completed her PhD at the School of Architecture, University College Dublin. She is a Professor of Environmental Design at OCAD University.
References
Ro, Brandon Richard and Julio Bermudez. “Understanding extraordinary architectural experiences through content analysis of written narratives,” Enquiry: A Journal for Architectural Research, Vol. 12, Issue 1, p. 17.
Ulrich, Roger S. “View through a window may influence recovery from surgery,” Science. April 27, 1984 Vol. 224, p. 420
Ulrich, Roger S., et al. “A review of the research literature on evidence-based healthcare design,” Healthcare Leadership White Paper Series, 2008, Vol. 5, p. 63
Fahy, Kathleen; Maralyn Foureur and Carolyn Hastie. Birth Territory and Midwifery Guardianship: Theory for Practice, Education and Research Books for Midwives, Elsevier, 2008.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Landes, D.A. (trans.) Routledge, 2012. Original work published in 1945.
Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception: Classic Edition. Psychology Press–Taylor and Francis, 2015. First published, 1979.