PLANTS FOR A BETTER LIFE - PEOPLE-PLANT RELATIONSHIPS IN INDOOR WORK ENVIRONMENTS

This paper presents the preliminary results of a recently conducted pilot-study. The pilot study is part of a study investigating how the use of plants and flowers at workplaces affects well-being of the employees. The objective is to generate data enabling us to build a theory of people-plants relationships in indoor work environ¬ments based on a rich and in-depth understanding of the phenomenon. Therefore an explorative, inductive and qualitative research design was developed. The objective of the pilot-study was to test whether the research design is suitable in order to generate data, giving a deeper understanding of people-plant relationships in indoor work environments. The research design was tested as a case-study in a real-life workplace - a cross-disciplinary unit with 21 employees at a department at a large research institution in Denmark. The preliminary analysis of the data indicates that the data deliver very rich information. Further the pilot-study documented that people-plant relationships in indoor work environments are a complex and dynamic phenomenon going on at many different levels influenced by both physical, organisational, social and personal aspects. The preliminary conclusion is that the developed research design is suitable in order to generate an in-depth and rich understanding of the different aspects of people-plant relationships in indoor work environments.