WHAT IS TAKING THE PULSE AND WHY ARE WE DOING IT?
As part of a wider MU interest in staff and student health and wellbeing, we want, on one afternoon in April, to ‘take the pulse’ of campus life and use the campus space as a form of ‘living lab’. The Taking the Pulse event will act as a form of spatial diagnostic on the health of the campus and the people in it, by checking in on the baseline health of both place and people and how these might in turn be mapped out and traced in the future as well. During the pandemic we all re-discovered ‘nearby nature’ and the value of natural green and blue spaces to keep us healthy and well. Now we are back on campus it might be nice to consider the campus as nearby nature as well, and to think beyond the interior of buildings and our phones, to pay fuller attention to the natural spaces around us. Many staff and students, we think, rarely engage with the campus in this way, and with exam season upon us, why not think about the campus as a resource and asset to provide respite at a busy time and to discover our own wellness spaces within it.
WHAT WE HOPE TO FIND OUT?
To start the ball rolling we want to do a live in-situ consultation with the campus community, students and staff, to find out from you what a healthy campus might look like and particularly how you see and use the campus as a health-enabling space. Using methods that work with static maps but also mobile recordings of people moving around the campus, we want to identify those places and spaces on the campus that you identify as promoting health, as well as those that maybe act as barriers to health and wellbeing. All the material collected will give us important insights to start on developing initiatives in this area and also move towards getting formal recognition of MU through a Healthy Campus Charter. Today’s event is to identify some baseline knowledge that will get us started on this road, which also includes additional themes around safe spaces, equality, diversity and inclusion.
HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED
Today we are carrying out a campus community mapping exercise; literally asking people to mark up on a map those places on campus they perceive or utilise as healthy; and those that maybe have the opposite effect. You can contribute by drawing on the large maps placed in the foyer of TSI and adding some comments on the map and on post-it notes. The other way you can get involved is to join our volunteers to go on walks around different parts of the North and South campuses, following both fixed and open-ended trails and recording your responses to the campus as you move around it.
WHERE AND WHEN TO MEET
From 1.00 to 4.00 pm on the day, you can come to either the TSI Building Foyer to help build a community health map of the North Campus and the South Campus.
If you are feeling more energetic, join one of our volunteers on a guided walk/trail, where you can tell us in situ about your feelings/responses to the campus as you literally go-along. All of the walks will start outside the TSI, and we have also published a working timetable for each one and where they start and end. Each should take no more than 15 or 20 minutes. Go-along is an increasingly widely used method to gather information on the subtle and different ways spaces and places work for people and how they affect/respond to them. We will record those responses and also want to gather responses from diverse student groups if possible and have been liaising with student societies and academic departments to get different groups involved. But you are more than welcome to join as an interested individual as well. The kinds of trails we are going to walk on range from tree and biodiversity trails to sensory trails to trails that consider how people with disabilities and impairments move around the campus space. There is also a lot of interest in how being in nature helps with attention restoration, stress reduction and place fascination, as well as encouraging better pro-environmental responses, so they are all things to think about as you move around. It’s also a chance for you to maybe go to parts of the campus you have never been to before, and its about discovery and improved awareness as well.
Please contact ronan.foley@mu.ie to get involved!