Emma Bass’ training as a nurse before becoming a photographer has directly shaped her thirteen–year practice of placing floral photographic works into clinical environments. Her prints have been installed in oncology centres, hospices, maternity and stillbirth units, hospitals and aged care facilities in New Zealand and internationally – and consistent unsolicited responses from patients, families and clinical staff suggest the works produce measurable effects. This practice has generated situated knowledge about how design decisions – flower species, colour temperature, scale, spatial placement, environmental relationship – shape patient experience. Such knowledge is tacit within her practice, the Floral Effect Project aims to create new research from it.

Research on human responses to flowers has developed primarily within psychology, evolutionary biology and environmental health, built on biometric methodologies. This work has produced measurable evidence that photographic floral imagery influences stress, autonomic nervous function and clinical outcome, but it has not examined the design decisions determining these effects. Human–centred design methods hold potential to produce knowledge about the shape, substance and emotional resonance of what patients encounter – yet these remain outside the frame of existing research.

The Floral Effect Project is a design–led research collaboration between Bass and design researcher Aaron Fry. Proposing an action research approach that activates Bass’s existing installations, it proposes to bring design knowledge into dialogue with biometric and psychosocial outcome measures. We invite participants to consider what a design–led investigation of floral photography in clinical environments would need to examine, and how their expertise might contribute.