Creating mentally restorative landscape for sweatshop workers: a participatory research

Abstract

At least 19 suicides occurred at two Fox***n factories from January 2010 to April 2013 in Shenzhen, China. Fox***n is the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer and a well­known example of sweatshops. Each Fox***n workers averagely works on the assembly line for 10 hours and repeats the same action for thousands of times each day. Recent studies reported that one main reason for suicide is long­term exposure to highly stressful and monotonous factory environment. The outdoor environment in Fox***n was frequently described as monotonous, barren, and lifeless by workers. Although the significant relationship between landscapes and human’s mental health has been found by empirical studies in other environments, no research has examined impacts of outdoor environment in manufacturing factory on workers’ mental health. We urgently need know to what extent there are connections between the environment and worker’s mental status and identify correct landscape design strategies in order to avert the tragedy and promote mental health. We used a participatory photograph­survey to examine the relationship between environmental characteristics of the factory and workers’ stress and depression status. We asked each of 65 Fox***n workers to take three photos for three places that most likely influenced their stress and depression status in the daily life. Then each worker answered a 7­point Likert­scale questionnaire to evaluate environmental characteristics of the place and her/his stress and depression status associated with that place. The questionnaire was designed based on Ulrich’s (1991) theory of supportive design, which including three aspects: perception of control, social support, and positive distraction. Then, the worker was asked to describing their feelings about those places. After that, the worker located those places on a GoogleEarth satellite photograph. Regression analysis, spatial analysis, and text analysis were used to identify the possible associations among environmental characteristics and workers’ stress and depression status. The analysis revealed that several environmental factors are significantly associated with mental stress and depression (p< 0.05), including the greenness (+), chaos (­), private activity (+), open vision (+), noise (­), naturalness (+), sunshine (+). Besides, factory layout and time management also contribute to the worker’s high mental stress and depression. These findings suggest green, naturalistic, and compatible landscape near each factory building and canteen are crucial in order to let busy workers gain a significant stress recovery in a short break (10 minutes).