Abstract:

Introduction:
Health is our wealth and we are rarely aware that the choice of living environment (house/apartment) and working environment (school/office) affects us. Long-term exposure to poor housing micro-climate may lead to disruption of harmonious functioning of the organism, its organs and cells. Architects have a big influence on creating good working and living environment, but they usually focus only on aesthetics and forget how the design could influence also different dimensions of users health. With this article we wanted to highlight the importance of creating quality living or working environment on human health interdisciplinary (architects and doctors together), and at the same time explore different methods to educate students of medicine and architecture on the link between the architectural design of buildings and the health of its users (various aspects of living micro-climate, affecting human health: choice of location, materials, methods of construction, air quality, lighting, room temperature, sound, layout).

Aims and Objectives:
The main aim is to explore new ways of teaching architecture and medicine students, especially through interdisciplinary collaboration and project based learning: by working together students of architecture can learn something new about medicine and students of medicine can learn something new about architecture. Moreover, the aim of this study is also to show the importance of designing the quality living/working environment for health. The main question discussed in this article is: How can students learn something about other disciplines by simply working together on the real-life projects?

Methods:
The study presented in this article was done at University of Ljubljana as part of research “Super micro climate in living environment” in 2015, founded by Public Fund for Human Resources Development and Scholarship Fund. Students learned about the advantages/disadvantages of different architectural concepts through interdisciplinary collaboration and practical work on the ground (in the company and in the field, for example visiting different houses). The article will discuss innovative approaches of learning: interdisciplinary collaboration between architecture and medicine students; virtual collaboration between students, mentors, practitioners, professionals with advanced digital tools; project based learning: working on the real-life project; collaboration with the industry and practice professionals: medical center BARSOS-MC and construction company DamaHaus; using different research methods: observation, semi-structured interviews and survey.

Results:
The article presents the results of different parts of the case study. Quality living environment: research project on connections between health and architectural design; real-life project in medical center on the design of quality working environment; semi-structured interviews and survey between lay public on the design of quality living environment.

Discussion and Conclusion:
In the discussion part the evaluation of different methods for teaching architecture and medicine students is presented. Based on the results of this study there is the need for interdisciplinary collaboration between public health experts, medical doctors, architects, mechanical and structural engineers. The guidelines for designing quality indoor working environment should be discussed from public health and architecture view.

Keywords:

Medicine, Architecture, Interdisciplinary collaboration, project based learning, research projects.