Sessions
Keynote Address
2:00 PM - 2:20 PM Wed
Margo Annemans, trained as an engineer-architect and anthropologist, is an FWO fellow and postdoctoral researcher at the Research[x]Design (RxD) group at KU Leuven. Her current research focuses on how space can contribute to activating end-users in healthcare environments. Therefore, she combines insights and approaches from multiple disciplines like architecture, anthropology, nursing, and movement science. In 2017, she first explored this topic as a visiting researcher at the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT. Here her research focused on staff’s experience of motion in a psychiatric centre.
Margo is also interested in how designers, clients, and other actors in care contexts can gain insight into people’s experience. In this respect, she repeatedly engages in short term projects with architecture and healthcare organisations.
From 2010-2015 Margo conducted a PhD on how patients experience hospital buildings and how this experience can inform architectural practice. Before and during her PhD, funded by a Baekeland grant of Flanders Innovation and Technology (VLAIO), she worked at osar architects nv, an architecture company focusing on (health)care.
For her PhD research Margo was awarded the 'L(euven) da Vinci Prize', a prize for a junior researcher who made a valuable contribution to the implementation or future development of knowledge transfer strategies by means of research, research management or research support activities. She received this prize for the fact that her PhD research on the spatial experience of hospitals patients laid the foundations for several follow-up projects in RxD, attracted significant interest from architecture and nursing practice, and shows considerable potential for further knowledge transfer.