A Room That Does Not Rush
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Residential care environments support young people who may experience neurodivergence, trauma, emotional distress, or other complex care needs. While these settings are designed to ensure physical safety, they often prioritize risk reduction over the sensory and emotional qualities that shape everyday life.
This project explores how interior architecture can contribute to wellbeing within safety-critical care environments. Focusing on the dining room, it asks how a space traditionally governed by safety requirements can also support comfort, autonomy, and emotional regulation.
Rather than treating design as a final outcome, the project uses interior design as a research method. Through site visits, interviews, workshops, sensory mapping, literature studies, and iterative prototyping, the project investigates how care environments are experienced through movement, transitions, and sensory interaction.
The dining experience is understood as a sequence of moments rather than a single room: arriving, entering, eating, withdrawing, and leaving. Each moment reveals different emotional and sensory needs, which were translated into spatial strategies that support orientation, choice, social participation, and opportunities for retreat when needed.
The result is a design proposal for a residential care dining environment. More than a fixed dining room, the project proposes a dining experience that balances safety and wellbeing. By shifting attention from preventing harm alone toward actively supporting everyday wellbeing, the project highlights how interior architecture can contribute to more humane and supportive care environments.
Thesis_A-Room-That-Does-Not-Rush_PDF