Nina Briggs’s research examines the making of the built environment and the socio-politics of belonging in places. She seeks to foster a holistic pedagogy and practice, incorporating empirical research in sociology, ecology, psychology and neuroscience to ensure a culture of intersectional equity in landscape environments for a diversity of human bodies and perspectives. In approaching design through the filters of culture and human behavior, my research swings towards the sensorial and experiential phenomena of space, which extends to the spatial effects on human health.

Currently, Nina is conducting an investigation of the current discourse around shade creation - as a symbol to offset global warming and to create ecologically and culturally sustainable public spaces – framing shade, tree canopy and reforestation as seemingly innocuous commodities and challenging shade and shelter disparities lacking from urban planning, utilities and transportation policies. The interrelationships between and the obstacles to shade creation are complex and interlaced. The network of urban infrastructure policy and socioeconomic / political influence continually clog efforts to provide urban shelter (both architectural and natural canopy) beginning with the marginalized communities that need shade most. These impediments bypass the most injurious outcome of shadeless environments the risks to public health. Built and planted shade discourse is usually derailed by bureaucratic complexities, thus overlooking, minimizing or eliminating the ill health effects of triple digit temperatures resulting in extreme surface temperatures contributing to the urban heat island index, energy shortages, increased air pollutants, and visual and thermal glare as a result of the climate change crisis. The future of shade geography is dependent upon how the discourse can redirect perceptions and advocacy towards the social, cognitive, biological, physiological, psychological as well as medical and climate crisis science as determinant factors to redefine the quality of our built environment and its inhabitants.

In researching the building materials designers use and specify, Nina examines the unequivocal impact of materials on human and environmental health. This is imperative as inhabitants spend up to ninety percent of their lives inside buildings. As knowledge of the many ecological and economic problems associated with building materials increases in terms of material properties, ingredients, the chemical additives used to fabricate them, the manufacturing process the negative, environmental impact of materials on human health is increasingly unsettling, particularly in the context of climate change. Now, more than ever, natural and healthy materials should be the mainstream market priority for the built environment industry and consumers and nearly every other industry. It is compulsory for designers and the building materials sector like the farm to table movement to demonstrate holistic adaptation to a science informed understanding of materials’ sourcing and impact, as well as how they impact human and environmental health.