What were your research questions? And what were you hoping to discover?

Note: This digital collage was created using Microsoft Bing’s AI Image Creator.

 I articulated my research questions in this way:

• How can a landscape architecture design process be trauma-informed?

• In what ways can the designed landscape be trauma-informed to support present and future residents?

• How does a relational research model influence the design process?

I wanted to know what a trauma-informed design process could look like. I hadn’t been exposed to that in my department and it wasn’t anything I saw designers near me doing. It intrigued me. I wondered, what does a trauma-informed design process feel like for the designer? For the users? How is it different and how is it similar to what I’m learning in my program from other professors? How can it be done in an academic context and how can it be done successfully? How could it be used to facilitate designs for community members? When looking at a transitional housing community, how does that change the design decisions when you center resident needs and health?

Additionally, when coming from the lens of an indigenous research paradigm, I wondered how a trauma-informed design process could center the values of relationality and holism. How could the process be impacted when you focus on the relationship between humans and animals and space together? There was a long list of questions that I hoped to answer and even after this research, there are still many more questions to answer and discover.