The Floral
Effect Project

Emma Bass grew up around hospitals. Her father was a cardiologist, her mother a radiographer — and at ten years old she painted on the internal window of a coronary care unit, watching what happened when colour and image entered a clinical space.

She trained and practised as a registered nurse before building a twenty-two year career as a commercial photographer. Since 2012 she has worked as a fine artist, creating floral photographic works that have been placed in hospices, oncology units, aged care facilities, funeral homes, and hospital wards across Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally.

That practice — fourteen years of placing work in the spaces where people are most in need — is the origin of the research question. Beyond clinical environments, people increasingly seek out Emma's work to accompany them through significant life events: grief, illness, caregiving, loss. The anecdotal evidence is substantial. The Floral Effect Project is the formal effort to understand what that evidence is pointing toward.

Aaron Fry began with a fine arts degree at the University of Auckland — a foundation that has shaped everything that followed. He is now Director of MDes at the School of Engineering and Design, University of Auckland, and a PhD candidate in design cognition.

From Auckland he built a design career in the United States, where he held a tenured faculty position at Parsons School of Design in New York — one of the world's leading design institutions. He returned to Aotearoa New Zealand and has since developed a research programme investigating how design shapes the way people think, feel, and respond to their environments.

His collaboration with Emma Bass on The Floral Effect Project brings design research methodology to a question that sits at the edge of art, science, and clinical practice — and positions the project within a rigorous academic framework capable of generating findings that matter beyond the gallery wall.