View from the Field: An Adaptive Reuse Project with a Trauma-Informed Design Lens, to Benefit a Child-Abuse Intervention Center

J. Davis Harte (University of Technology Sydney)

This practice and research project is an adaptive reuse project designed for a child abuse intervention center. The center purchased a large (8,000 sq ft) building built in 1980, originally designed for financial services. The abuse-intervention center has led a multi-year design process to remodel and expand the building to facilitate an increase in quality and quantity of services.

The project described here used both a rapid ethnography process and trauma-informed design knowledge, which may be seen as an exemplar of seeking balance between practicality of practice and of epistemological standards. Although there is some evidence to inform the physical design for domestic abuse residential shelters and for substance-abuse centers, there is a notable lack of evidence to inform child abuse-intervention center built design. Similarly, although there has been some advance recently, there is still sparse trauma-informed design evidence for any setting. The current design process for child abuse intervention centers often seems to be determined by center staff preferences and the architectural teams’ understanding of precedence. This project seeks to address this gap in the trauma-informed evidence-based design (EBD) knowledge. Upon engagement as the environmental designer for the project, the researcher applied both a trauma-informed design evidence and a rapid ethnographic process. Expectations for an on-going design iteration process, amongst the interdisciplinary team, strengthened the design outcomes. Photographic documentation of the existing center, the new building before renovation, and the 18-month long design journey as it led to the final trauma-informed EBD adaptive reuse project will be presented. Detailed field notes accompany the research process. The ‘how’ of the evidence translation, into the final designs, will be described in detail. An understanding of the trauma-informed design process in a child-abuse intervention setting will arm both scholars and practitioners with creative, timely and pragmatic tools for complex environments.