Welcome to Supportive Environments and Evidence-based Design (SEED) Lab

SEED Lab examines how supportive environments shape health, well-being, and everyday experience through landscape architecture and evidence-based design. Our research focuses on the relationships between people and outdoor environments, including parks, therapeutic landscapes, and other public spaces, with an emphasis on evaluation and landscape performance. We also investigate how environmental needs vary across age groups, including children, to inform more inclusive and health-supportive design.

Recent Projects

Children’s Book and Learning Games on Indiana Native Plants & Habitats

“Children’s Book and Learning Games on Native Plants” are the efforts of us landscape architecture students passing down to younger audiences two crucial things we have learned during our time as university students: plant native, and right plant, right place! By passing down this knowledge earlier in children’s education, the native ecosystems and habitats of our local environments could drastically change for the better and promote healthier habitats.

https://www.asla.org/2023studentawards/8931.html

The free digital version of the book can be downloaded here: https://mdc.itap.purdue.edu/item.asp?Item_Number=HG-268-W

Journal article discussing the motivation, process, and result: Bloom and Grow: Creating an Illustrated Book and Learning Games on Native Plants for Children.

Project Narrative and Image credit: Chloe Kennedy, Kayla Kramer, Molly Wimberg, Autumn McNinch, and Wanting Zhang

Exploring the Potential for Greener Schoolyards in Indianapolis

Edible schoolyards can improve children’s experiential learning, promote greater environmental responsibility, provide access to fresh foods, and foster healthier dietary practices. Despite these benefits, the adoption of green and edible schoolyards in Indiana is still quite limited. This project seeks to examine the existing tree canopy and garden spaces within school properties to explore the relationship between these green areas and demographic variables such as race, income, and population density. The goal is to uncover any disparities in the creation of school environments. This project is Wanting Zhang’s thesis project.

Project Narrative and Image credit: Wanting Zhang. Image Refinement: Serine Kao

A Battle Against Nutrient Pollution – Landscape Interventions along the White River

Nutrient pollution is a pressing problem in the surface waters of the United States. Annually, agricultural runoff rich in nutrients from the Midwest plays a major role in exacerbating the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. This project focuses on strategic locations along the White River in Indiana, specifically targeting nutrient pollution in the upper west fork. It aims to develop a suite of landscape interventions toolkits (16 typologies) suitable for agricultural, suburban, and urban settings. By prioritizing ecological restoration, improving human interactions with the environment, and boosting community involvement, this initiative seeks to create a planning framework for future low-impact remediation efforts along the upper West Fork White River. This project is Yahan You’s senior capstone project.

Project Designer and Image credits: Yahan You.