Abstract
This paper investigates habitability in extreme environment habitats by examining how occupants contribute to the evolution of functional infrastructures into human-centered environments that support wellbeing. Through fieldwork at the Bulgarian Antarctic Base (BAB), the study combines architectural on-site observations with interviews, questionnaires, and participatory workshops. Three trends emerged from the combined material, highlighting the importance of regulating social interaction through semi-private spaces, the value of flexible spatial organization across work and leisure, and the role of personalization in supporting emotional stability, helping occupants claim the base as a lived habitat over time. By using occupants’ evaluations and spatial adaptations as evidence, the study informs design in a context rarely experienced firsthand by designers and proposes a participatory framework for assessing habitability in constrained environments already shaped by standardized planning and logistics. It offers an informed approach for translating lived spatial experience into qualitative interior characteristics.
Keywords
Participatory Design, Extreme Environments, Spatial Familiarity, Adaptive Habitats
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.327
Citation
Gourounti, E., Liapi, M., and Oungrinis, K. (2026) Habitability in extreme environments: A participatory design approach to assess wellbeing., in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.327
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Habitability in extreme environments: A participatory design approach to assess wellbeing.
This paper investigates habitability in extreme environment habitats by examining how occupants contribute to the evolution of functional infrastructures into human-centered environments that support wellbeing. Through fieldwork at the Bulgarian Antarctic Base (BAB), the study combines architectural on-site observations with interviews, questionnaires, and participatory workshops. Three trends emerged from the combined material, highlighting the importance of regulating social interaction through semi-private spaces, the value of flexible spatial organization across work and leisure, and the role of personalization in supporting emotional stability, helping occupants claim the base as a lived habitat over time. By using occupants’ evaluations and spatial adaptations as evidence, the study informs design in a context rarely experienced firsthand by designers and proposes a participatory framework for assessing habitability in constrained environments already shaped by standardized planning and logistics. It offers an informed approach for translating lived spatial experience into qualitative interior characteristics.