Designing meaningful connections
with the outdoors.
My doctoral research explores how design can support older adults’ engagement with outdoor places in residential aged care. Making, gardening, and nature discovery offer different ways to take part.
Enhancing Outdoor Engagement for Older Adults in Residential Aged Care
How can design support meaningful outdoor engagement within the realities of everyday care?
From making to noticing.
Making
Connecting shared crafts with outdoor spaces.
2025 · Study 2Growing
Exploring plant care and participation over time.
2025 · Study 3Discovering
Following curiosity through maps, cards, and sound.
2026 · Ongoing explorationSharing
Connecting walks, personal choices, and shared stories.
These projects inform one another. They offer different ways of participating; they are not a sequence that every participant follows.
Making together
Shared crafting, brought together in an outdoor Nativity display.
Our Garden
Exploring plants, care, and the rhythms of everyday participation.
Following curiosity
Maps, nature cards, and birdsong as invitations to notice and share.
Design grows through
working together.
Start with everyday life
Observe existing activities and listen to residents and staff. Attend to familiar routines, preferences, and the practical conditions of taking part.
Make, try, and adjust
Develop tangible materials and try them together. Reconsider complexity, visibility, handling, and the kinds of contribution each activity makes possible.
Reflect across encounters
Bring field observations, conversations, photographs, and reflective memos into qualitative analysis, tracing what changes and what remains difficult.
Questions I keep
coming back to.
How can an activity welcome different ways of participating? What remains after a session ends? How do materials, staff collaboration, and daily routines shape what can continue?
Beyond the doctoral project
My wider research explores human–AI interaction, AI in education, and technology adoption, including creative co-production and learning across generations. I work with collaborators across design, HCI, education, and related fields to develop these questions together.
- Design
- Human–Computer Interaction
- Older adults
- AI and Education
- Technology Adoption
The Publications page brings together this collaborative work.
PhD in Design · Swinburne University of Technology · Supervisors: Prof. Sonja Pedell, Prof. Leon Sterling, and Dr. Diego Muñoz.