Sensing Maternity Spaces: Using creative approaches to explore sensory experiences within a maternity department

Maternity settings are unique in their function. Despite researchers increasingly demonstrating the impact that the design of health/care environments has on those working within and accessing services, to date limited attention has been paid to the sensory and aesthetic qualities of maternity settings. This project aims to explore the past, present, and future of the NHS hospital environment. Research consists of two strands of study: (1) archival and oral history research; and (2) creative research working with patients, staff, and visitors. This paper focuses on work from the creative research, which involved using a range of embodied, sensory, and creative approaches to work with staff and patients/service users to explore their experiences of a maternity setting. Research demonstrated staff and patients’/service users’ wants and needs, to identify changes to the environment. This research challenges dominant calls for maternity settings to be ‘homely’ in their look and feel, instead presenting a series of findings in which people shared their hopes for maternity settings that centred on feeling seen, heard, and validated.