Paper short abstract:

Our paper shows how everyday practices in which entities such as an aquarium are involved, are intrinsically part of what constitutes children's lived space in the hospital. Doing ethnography by carefully untangling the doings of and around such a 'thing' offers ways to research built environments.

Paper long abstract:

Since the turn of the 21st century we see a shift towards integrating into research 'the view of the child' to understand and inform the design of built care environments. Researchers started to explore children's perspectives on and affective relationships with the built hospital environment. People experience the environment, however, from within - that is, as part of it. This way of thinking about space has recently been advanced by posthuman or socio-material approaches. Through notions such as 'encounter' or 'gathering' these approaches direct attention to how human and other-than-human entities mutually constitute each other in and through everyday practices.

To present these everyday practices with and of children in the hospital we first draw on Schatzki's (2002) practice theory and Gibson's (1979) theory of affordances. Then we further clarify our way of thinking by turning as empirical focus to a 'thing' to research children's lived space in the hospital. Our case study presents an aquarium as a gathering node to understand children's everyday practices in a pediatric cancer-care ward and as an entry point to analyse the relocation of this ward to a new building.

Our aim is to show how mundane practices in which entities such as an aquarium are involved, are intrinsically part of what constitutes children's lived space in a pediatric hospital. Doing ethnography by carefully untangling these everyday practices asserts, we argue, something that may go unnoticed in the dominant discourse surrounding the design of care environments.