My PhD study, titled “Transitional Shelter for Syrian Refugees in Lebanon”, merges the themes of displacement, architecture, and sustainability. Nowadays, around 1% of the world’s total population is displaced, particularly due to wars. Since 2014, Syria has been the main country of origin of millions of refugees. These refugees have fled to more than 126 countries, with Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon having welcomed the biggest numbers of Syrian refugees worldwide. Most notably, Lebanon has been hosting the largest number of Syrian refugees per capita in the world.

For refugees, life is tough and filled with challenges. One of the most prominent issues that they struggle with is getting access to safe shelters that would allow them to live their lives in dignity. Indeed, most often than not, shelters provided for the displaced are quickly created, with no considerations for security, safety, or protection. In other words, survival is the only factor that is regarded. Moreover, many refugees are obliged to jump from temporary shelter to temporary shelter before permanently settling down. As these transitional and/or temporary shelters end up being used for months or years at a time, it then becomes imperative that they provide refugees with a sense of safety and dignity.

Therefore, I have chosen to focus my study on designing T-shelters which would enable Syrian refugees to feel safe, secure and at ‘home’. They would be created by using green building materials that are durable, reusable, or recyclable and that are locally sourced to benefit Lebanon. These T-shelters are meant to be easy to assemble, dissemble, and transport, making them suitable options at times of emergency. Their design would also be adapted to reflect the culture of Syrian refugees, thus encouraging and promoting cultural diversity. 

Social media has changed how the museum audience responds to and values exhibited material culture.

General observation of images posted to Instagram by museum visitors suggests that, armed with their own smartphones and social media, visitors are equipped to collect, exhibit, and certify museum-things themselves, and this may de-centralise the authoritative voice of the museum. Literature suggests that visitor photography allows the museum visitor to make meaning, and consequently, museum art, artefacts and spaces transform, they become polysemic; they work for the museum, but through exhibition on social media, they also work for and are owned through reproduction, by the visitor. 

This doctorate will use data from social media with grounded theory to develop the idea of ‘instant collecting’. The research aims to understand the motivations behind personal photography, to develop photographic collecting profiles of the digital museum visitor and better understand how museums may best react to changing consumption patterns of their audience.

Hatice Sule Ozer is a PhD student in the research group of Architecture, Culture, and Tectonics in the Department of Architecture at the University of Nottingham, which she joined in July 2019, under the supervision of Professor Jonathan Hale and Dr Laura Hanks. Previously, she received a Bachelor Degree in Interior Architecture from the University of Selcuk in Turkey (2011-15) and worked for a year as an interior designer of hotel-museums. She also has an MA in Interior Design from the University of Portsmouth (2017-18).

Research Aim: The research focuses on the nature of the house-museums representation as an encounter between the private and public, investigating artist-studio houses involved in the transformation from a semi-private/semi-public home to a public museum. 

Methodology: The research goes on to evaluate the effectiveness of the museum curators' communication strategies in two contrasting case studies of artists' house-museums, one of which was originally a personal and private living and working space, and the other was a semi-public combination of home, studio and gallery. To identify the most effective interpretive approaches adopted by each of the museum design teams (directors, curators, designers etc.) used in each case, a process of mapping, spatial analysis, visitor surveys and theoretical methods is used.