Emma Tempest

Cultivating the spaces that hold us: postpartum health and design in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Emma Tempest’s doctoral research explores how nature-led design can enhance postpartum health in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Emma’s research lands at the intersection of people and their connectedness to health and place through therapeutic environments. It looks at ways the lived experiences of postpartum wellbeing can guide design disciplines.

The research integrates liminality as a tool for reflection and inspiration. Emma investigates how spaces influence a sense of place, a sense of peace, and how we might understand and reflect these through design.

Using a visual narrative and an arts-based participatory methodology, the research engages with Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples; eliciting their personal postpartum insights and gathering perspectives from interdisciplinary specialists.

An openness from its participants illustrates the diversity, similarities and universality that speak to the objectives of the research. The PhD research gives space to explore, be open and innovate in a formative and healing way. It supports Emma drawing from a long-held interest and affinity for ancestral geographies, cultural landscapes and storying. Emma's approach provides the study's participants with an opportunity to be heard and share meaningful stories from their lives.

Emma hopes her PhD research will support and encourage positive discussion and practice for postpartum wellbeing across design disciplines, today and in times ahead.

Supervisors

Dr Bruno Marques, School of Architecture

Dr Catherine Caudwell, School of Design Innovation