Seminar: Dr Anahita Sal Moslehian
On Friday the 19th of May we hosted a seminar presented by Dr Anahita Sal Moslehian titled “The nature of innovation in hospital building design”.
Dr Anahita Sal Moslehian is a postdoctoral research fellow with the HOME Strategic Research and Innovation Centre at the School of Architecture & Built Environment, Deakin University. With a background qualification in Architecture, Anna's research interests are building design innovation, health-promoting design, biophilic design, and healing environments. In her PhD thesis, Anna worked on design innovation and systems thinking. She developed a framework elucidating the nature of the innovation ecosystem in hospital building design. Her research highlighted the main components of the innovation ecosystem and the most influential and interrelated contextual factors, as well as representing and mapping generative interactions that support innovation processes.
Anna is an EDAC-certified researcher working on the impacts of healthcare facility design on occupants’ health and wellbeing to create facilities that promote healthier environments for patients and staff. She collaborated with Biophilia Lab in 2022-23 as a postdoctoral researcher on the application of the biophilic design framework in the design and construction of Mental Health, Alcohol and Other Drugs facilities in Barwon Health. While her primary focus is on healthcare buildings, Anna also conducts research on housing and workplaces to better understand how the design of everyday spaces can promote human health and wellbeing, care, and cure. Anna has investigated housing research in the Australian context as a member of HOME, a team of experienced design researchers tackling complex issues related to housing. She collaborates in research projects aiming to inform the design of social and affordable housing, family-friendly apartments, and health-promoting built environment that positively impact vulnerable communities. Anna has actively contributed to five key projects with HOME so far, including her latest study on exploring the impacts of living in compact modular units on the transitioning process of homeless men.
Anna’s seminar focused on exploring the complex processes trigger design innovations and impact their ecosystems. She also explored why focusing solely on the disconnect between research and practice is an oversimplification, and the need to examine innovation from a systemic perspective.
Her presentation highlighted the main components of the innovation ecosystem and its overall behaviour in the field. Anna also explored the most influential and interrelated contextual factors, as well as representing and mapping generative interactions that support innovation processes. The seminar also expanded on how this knowledge can help stakeholders (including hospital researchers, designers, policymakers, and others) adopt a multidimensional outlook to analyse the strength of all influential factors, introduce potential novel ways of collaborating, conceptualise an organisational approach, re-formulate research questions through transdisciplinary methods, and introduce interdisciplinary courses and programs in architecture schools.
You can watch a recording of the seminar below.