In July, Ki attended the International Association for People-Environment Studies (IAPS) 2026 Conference, held at the University of Surrey in Guildford. This year's conference centred on the theme Sustainability as Wellbeing: Towards Healthy, Green, and Equitable Communities, bringing together over 400 researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from across the world to explore the intersection of person-environment research, sustainability, and health. Ki presented her doctoral work and was awarded the ECR Best Paper Award, the highest-value prize at the conference, at the Early Career Researcher Workshop. Please describe the event you attended.The IAPS Conference is one of the world's leading international gatherings for person-environment research, held every two years, bringing together scholars and practitioners investigating the transactions between people and their physical surroundings. IAPS 2026, hosted by the University of Surrey's Environmental Psychology Research Group, gathered over 400 delegates under the theme Sustainability as Wellbeing: Towards Healthy, Green, and Equitable Communities. This year's conference was distinctive in its explicit integration of sustainability into person-environment inquiry, exploring how the health of people and communities is deeply intertwined with the health of the planet and its ecosystems. Keynote speakers included leaders in restorative design, participatory planning, and climate psychology, complemented by a panel of practitioners and policymakers focused on healthy, sustainable, and inclusive cities. What drew you to attend this event?IAPS stands out for its genuinely interdisciplinary character, which reflects the nature of my own research approach. The conference brings together academic scholars presenting peer-reviewed work alongside practitioners sharing applied research from real-world settings, and government officials presenting policy review findings, all under the same roof and in genuine dialogue with one another. That kind of cross-sectoral exchange is rare, and it is exactly the kind of intellectual environment in which my research sits.What drew me most strongly, however, was the conference's dedicated Early Career Researcher (ECR) Workshop. An entire day is given over to supporting doctoral students and early-stage researchers, offering structured time to present work in progress, receive focused feedback from experienced mentors, and connect with peers navigating similar challenges. With my thesis submission approaching, I believed this would be an invaluable opportunity not only for my personal and professional development, but to receive substantive critique from experts in person-environment research at a critical moment in my write-up. Ki outside Guildford Cathedral How was your experience attending the event? What were the highlights and key moments?The experience was genuinely remarkable. One of the things that struck me most was how flat the culture of the conference was, with a minimal sense of hierarchy and an authentic spirit of openness. I found myself in conversation with keynote speakers who have spent thirty years in the field, who were entirely willing to sit alongside you during a session, engage openly with a presentation, and offer their honest thoughts on how a study might be strengthened. That kind of generosity is not always a given in academic settings, and it made the conference feel like a genuine community of inquiry rather than a performance of expertise.The undoubted highlight of my time at IAPS 2026 was being awarded the ECR Best Paper Award at the Early Career Researcher Workshop. This is the most significant award at the event, recognising the paper, presentation, and depth of scholarly discussion, and it carries a five-year IAPS membership. To be recognised in this way by experienced researchers in person-environment studies, at a conference of this scale and standing, felt like a meaningful acknowledgement of years of work. It was an encouragement that the research I am doing matters, and that the approach I have developed has something genuine to contribute to the field. Ki presenting their award-winning paper Ki is presented with the ECR Best Paper award How was this event relevant to your research, interdisciplinarity and the ACRC Academy?My doctoral research focuses on how we can better design opportunities for nature-based engagement in care home settings, and specifically how to facilitate more meaningful co-design discussions with residents, staff, and families to develop appropriate interventions. Care homes are environments shaped by multiple, overlapping constraints, whether physical, organisational, or relational, and the residents who live within them are disproportionately affected by declining physical and mental capacity. Identifying research methods that are both efficient and genuinely inclusive is therefore central to the work.The interdisciplinary reach of IAPS made it a particularly generative space for these questions. Practitioners across sessions were candid about the challenges and gains of different methodological approaches, offering real reflections on what works when working with people who have complex needs. One presentation that stayed with me involved an adaptation of sand therapy, originally developed for therapeutic use, being repurposed as an inquiry tool to help people with speech difficulties express how they felt spatial environments should be arranged. While the context was not specifically older people or care settings, the parallels were immediate and thought-provoking. Approaches like this point towards ways of enabling expression and participation that do not rely on verbal fluency alone, something with clear relevance for residents with dementia or limited communication, and a productive line of thinking for my own co-design methodology.More broadly, the conference reinforced the value and rigour of the research direction the ACRC Academy has cultivated, one that takes seriously the intersections of environment, identity, and wellbeing, and that insists on involving the people most affected in shaping the research that concerns them. Professor Marketta Kyttä gives a keynote speech Any lessons learnt / best practices that you would like to share?One of the most consistent and resonant messages across IAPS 2026 was the fundamentally transactional nature of person-environment relationships. The environment does not simply act upon people. People respond to, interpret, and reshape the environments around them in ways that are dynamic and deeply personal. This has direct implications for how we conduct research. Objective measurements of environmental conditions, such as light levels, noise, or spatial configuration, are rarely sufficient on their own to capture how individuals actually experience and respond to a place.What became clear across presentations was that perceived environmental qualities are the critical mediating layer, and these perceptions are shaped by multiple interacting forces: biographical history, cultural background, social context, and the accumulated circumstances of a person's life. Qualitative research, the conference repeatedly demonstrated, is not simply a supplement to quantitative inquiry. It is often the only methodological approach capable of capturing this depth and texture. The field of person-environment studies is, by its very nature, one where the richness of human experience resists reduction to numbers alone, and IAPS 2026 made a compelling case for holding both modes of inquiry in productive tension.For any early career researcher working at the intersection of environment, health, and wellbeing, I would strongly encourage attending a future IAPS conference. The combination of intellectual depth, methodological breadth, and genuine community makes it unlike any other event in the field.You can find out more about the IAPS conference series at the following link: IAPS-Association Ki's paper will be available next month. You can read all the conference abstracts, incluing Ki's, at the following link:IAPS conference abstracts This article was published on Monday 6 July 2026
