Dr. Valerie Carr

Research Associate

+44 (0) 1524 593477

Design for health and wellbeing, therapeutic environments, workplace design, post occupancy evaluation, community engagement, sustainable community housing in sub Saharan Africa.

Valerie is an interior designer with a background in workplace and healthcare design. She uses mainly qualitative and ethnographic methods to investigate the transactional nature of relationships between environments (built, natural and socially constructed) and behaviour. In considering how environments create affordances for certain types of behaviour and yet constrain (or are limited in their ability to influence) other types of behaviour, she seeks to identify environmental features which might interact with psychosocial elements to ameliorate stress in the workplace and in healthcare facilities.

Her PhD focused on healthcare work environments and she was part of an interdisciplinary team which evaluated the interior environmental design of maternity units in UK for the Department of Health. She has also worked with Shell UK as a workplace analyst. Along with her family she recently spent a year in Africa supervising the building of a series of houses for orphans.

Current research activities

Design in Practice: Flexibility and change for healthcare service providers

• Explore how people adapt to and drive change in Primary Care Trusts
• Explore how built and technical infrastructure supports or inhibits innovation and adaptation processes
• Develop design recommendations to improve the way the life cycle of infrastructure is designed, conceived and managed