Hospital Treatment Room Design
Vinyl Illustration and Installation for Boston Children’s Hospital
Hospitals, at baseline, are intimidating and unwelcoming, especially for a child or young adult.
As part of my work for L’Attitude Gallery, I design engaging artwork for permanent vinyl installation that aims to make a scary experience less scary: and possibly even fun. Each room has a distinct theme, with the goal of making an environment that distracts the patient from pain or fear. The process takes up to 18 months from concept design to installation. As of May 2021, my colleagues and I completed two MRI rooms, two X-ray rooms, a preprocedure room, and two hallway installations, with others in the pipeline.
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Vinyl Illustration and Installation for Boston Children’s Hospital
Hospitals, at baseline, are intimidating and unwelcoming, especially for a child or young adult.
As part of my work for L’Attitude Gallery, I design engaging artwork for permanent vinyl installation that aims to make a scary experience less scary: and possibly even fun. Each room has a distinct theme, with the goal of making an environment that distracts the patient from pain or fear. The process takes up to 18 months from concept design to installation. As of May 2021, my colleagues and I completed two MRI rooms, two X-ray rooms, a preprocedure room, and two hallway installations, with others in the pipeline.
Design Theory Response
Design Systems
I’m interested in healthcare design and designing for wellness, so Lucienne Roberts’ article is super interesting to me. I guess I knew that design influences healthcare but until I read this article I hadn’t thought about the scale and scope of it. Design played a lifesaving role in communicating the risks and destigmatizing malaria, leprosy and HIV/AIDS, and now COVID-19. Good universal design is important in these cases, and especially important in regions where literacy rates may be lower, or where there are a variety of languages spoken, in order to save lives and prevent suffering.
During the Ebola outbreak, awareness posters had to reach a culturally and linguistically diverse population with minimal formal literacy. That presents a unique design challenge, but an essential one. The solution was posters and cards that communicated signs and symptoms of the disease. I wish I learned about the United Nations’ open brief to creatives to help raise awareness and understanding of the Coronavirus and how to slow its spread. It’s clear that design is being utilized in a way that improves global health in the immediate future, and hopefully will save lives and the global economy in doing so. Reading this article certainly makes me wonder if better design communication early in the pandemic could have saved lives and educated people sooner, before it became politically charged. It also makes me wonder what other health design opportunities are out there in need of more universal design, and in improving design, how lives can be improved or even saved.
Design Systems
I’m interested in healthcare design and designing for wellness, so Lucienne Roberts’ article is super interesting to me. I guess I knew that design influences healthcare but until I read this article I hadn’t thought about the scale and scope of it. Design played a lifesaving role in communicating the risks and destigmatizing malaria, leprosy and HIV/AIDS, and now COVID-19. Good universal design is important in these cases, and especially important in regions where literacy rates may be lower, or where there are a variety of languages spoken, in order to save lives and prevent suffering.
During the Ebola outbreak, awareness posters had to reach a culturally and linguistically diverse population with minimal formal literacy. That presents a unique design challenge, but an essential one. The solution was posters and cards that communicated signs and symptoms of the disease. I wish I learned about the United Nations’ open brief to creatives to help raise awareness and understanding of the Coronavirus and how to slow its spread. It’s clear that design is being utilized in a way that improves global health in the immediate future, and hopefully will save lives and the global economy in doing so. Reading this article certainly makes me wonder if better design communication early in the pandemic could have saved lives and educated people sooner, before it became politically charged. It also makes me wonder what other health design opportunities are out there in need of more universal design, and in improving design, how lives can be improved or even saved.
Inspiration
Britain Get Talking
Britain Get Talking had a simple goal: to raise awareness of mental health by encouraging more people to talk about it, bringing families closer as a result.
Each print ad used the endline: ‘Tune back in to the story in your living room.’ This campaign was widespread and appeared alongside the TV guide section of newspapers all across the UK. Mental health is very stigmatized still, and it is often a challenge for individuals that are struggling to get proper help and support. The campaign reminds parents and carers to have conversations with their children about how they’re feeling. From a design perspective, this is clever because it plays off the standard TV guide layout, and fits in with the page but also stands out due to the image treatment (ripped) and colored boxes on a white page.
Time for entertainment in the home is often a time when families are home together, and is a time that adults can start having those conversations with their children. There is also a light sense of humor, that brightens up the topic in a way that invites the viewer to engage. Especially today, during a pandemic, anxiety and stress levels are higher than ever, and the unknown is scary. This seems to be very successful in opening the door for conversations within the home, which is an important place to start. The ads are also very identifiable, as they all vary in content and layout but have the same style.
Britain Get Talking
Britain Get Talking had a simple goal: to raise awareness of mental health by encouraging more people to talk about it, bringing families closer as a result.
Each print ad used the endline: ‘Tune back in to the story in your living room.’ This campaign was widespread and appeared alongside the TV guide section of newspapers all across the UK. Mental health is very stigmatized still, and it is often a challenge for individuals that are struggling to get proper help and support. The campaign reminds parents and carers to have conversations with their children about how they’re feeling. From a design perspective, this is clever because it plays off the standard TV guide layout, and fits in with the page but also stands out due to the image treatment (ripped) and colored boxes on a white page.
Time for entertainment in the home is often a time when families are home together, and is a time that adults can start having those conversations with their children. There is also a light sense of humor, that brightens up the topic in a way that invites the viewer to engage. Especially today, during a pandemic, anxiety and stress levels are higher than ever, and the unknown is scary. This seems to be very successful in opening the door for conversations within the home, which is an important place to start. The ads are also very identifiable, as they all vary in content and layout but have the same style.
Liminality During a Health Crisis
Interactive Design, Artivive App
At the beginning of this project, the concept of liminality didn’t have much of an application to my life. Then, after spending two weeks in Europe during the start of COVID-19 spreading throughout the world, suddenly our future plans weren’t as clear, and everything was up in the air. My classmates and I were asleep during the US travel ban announcement, and with no clear guidelines. We woke up in the middle of the night to calls and messages from worried friends, family, and professors. We got panicked messages telling us to get out, immediately. We packed what we could, and realized that all the airline websites were down. By the time we got to the airport, there were hundreds of other people also waiting to book any flight they could. Our group got split up all over the world and country, and no one knew what would be waiting for us on the other end.
That was the most in-between and uncertain I’ve felt in my life, jumping from our planned schedule to no schedule, unsure if we’d make it back to the US. These three AR files document my experience in a liminal time in my life. They’re chronological: when I woke up from a deep sleep to dozens of notifications, my thoughts as I couldn’t book a new flight or cancel my scheduled flight, and my experience in a crowded airport with hundreds of stressed Americans doing the same thing. This project transitioned from a “art-y” grad school assignment to a documentation of my very real experience.
Interactive Design, Artivive App
At the beginning of this project, the concept of liminality didn’t have much of an application to my life. Then, after spending two weeks in Europe during the start of COVID-19 spreading throughout the world, suddenly our future plans weren’t as clear, and everything was up in the air. My classmates and I were asleep during the US travel ban announcement, and with no clear guidelines. We woke up in the middle of the night to calls and messages from worried friends, family, and professors. We got panicked messages telling us to get out, immediately. We packed what we could, and realized that all the airline websites were down. By the time we got to the airport, there were hundreds of other people also waiting to book any flight they could. Our group got split up all over the world and country, and no one knew what would be waiting for us on the other end.
That was the most in-between and uncertain I’ve felt in my life, jumping from our planned schedule to no schedule, unsure if we’d make it back to the US. These three AR files document my experience in a liminal time in my life. They’re chronological: when I woke up from a deep sleep to dozens of notifications, my thoughts as I couldn’t book a new flight or cancel my scheduled flight, and my experience in a crowded airport with hundreds of stressed Americans doing the same thing. This project transitioned from a “art-y” grad school assignment to a documentation of my very real experience.
Inspiration
Tik Tok UX Design
Tik Tok has been a newsworthy app lately because it took the social media world by storm, and also is politically charged. It rapidly gained popularity with young users in 2020, and the majority of users are under 18. The app is addictive, with unlimited new content and short clips that are tailored to viewer scrolling experience and tendencies, and encourages users to scroll and scroll and scroll. This can be damaging to the mental health of young users who are learning to navigate the real world virtually during COVID. @TikTokTips is an account that is built into the algorithm that shows up with a wide variety of content creators after prolonged app use. The videos remind users to get a snack, go for a walk, and take a break from screen time.
Even though the app is problematic in other ways, this initiative is a successful way to remind young people to take breaks for their mental and physical wellbeing by being built into the content a viewer is shown. A notification or banner alert may not be as successful as a video reminder, because that’s what the viewer is expecting. While the app doesn’t stop viewers from continuing to scroll, the video reminder may be enough to shake up the viewer’s habits. It might not be quite enough, but the implementation of this was well designed.
Inspiration
Office Space
I’m excited by and intrigued by the movement by large companies to redesign office space for mental wellbeing. I visited this beautiful coworking space in Amsterdam during a workshop with The Daily Gorilla, and it’s clearly designed with employees in mind. The office is set up in a large warehouse and every element of the office is thoughtfully and carefully designed. The space encourages movement with wide open spaces and lots of open desk space for workers to make their space work best for them. The space is a relaxing environment with a wall of live plants, and enables collaboration with beautiful coworking pods for team meetings. There are massive windows, as natural light is beneficial for all-around wellbeing. Even the lighting was thought through, with natural light-imitating bulbs that were a far cry from the typical harsh office lighting.
Work is a source of stress, anxiety, and frustration for so many people, and architecture design for mental wellbeing is a way to alleviate that to some degree. This space was incredibly deliberate and thoughtful, and the best tell of all was that the workers seemed happy. Everyone who we interacted with commented on the beautiful space. We spent a day doing a workshop, and it definitely fostered a creative environment and promoted creativity. Mental health is inherently connected to the environment, and places like this one are a step in the right direction for mental health in the workplace.
Office Space
I’m excited by and intrigued by the movement by large companies to redesign office space for mental wellbeing. I visited this beautiful coworking space in Amsterdam during a workshop with The Daily Gorilla, and it’s clearly designed with employees in mind. The office is set up in a large warehouse and every element of the office is thoughtfully and carefully designed. The space encourages movement with wide open spaces and lots of open desk space for workers to make their space work best for them. The space is a relaxing environment with a wall of live plants, and enables collaboration with beautiful coworking pods for team meetings. There are massive windows, as natural light is beneficial for all-around wellbeing. Even the lighting was thought through, with natural light-imitating bulbs that were a far cry from the typical harsh office lighting.
Work is a source of stress, anxiety, and frustration for so many people, and architecture design for mental wellbeing is a way to alleviate that to some degree. This space was incredibly deliberate and thoughtful, and the best tell of all was that the workers seemed happy. Everyone who we interacted with commented on the beautiful space. We spent a day doing a workshop, and it definitely fostered a creative environment and promoted creativity. Mental health is inherently connected to the environment, and places like this one are a step in the right direction for mental health in the workplace.
Spot
UX Design for Boston University
Spot provides real-time crowd and density monitoring tools across the BU campus, allowing students to gauge crowd size and building occupancy in certain areas so they can more effectively evaluate their risks and make more informed decisions on campus as we adapt to COVID. As the UX designer on the team, I had to make sure the interface would be usable for all students.
Designed in partnership with BU Spark!.
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UX Design for Boston University
Spot provides real-time crowd and density monitoring tools across the BU campus, allowing students to gauge crowd size and building occupancy in certain areas so they can more effectively evaluate their risks and make more informed decisions on campus as we adapt to COVID. As the UX designer on the team, I had to make sure the interface would be usable for all students.
Designed in partnership with BU Spark!.
