Recently the Director General of Health Chai Chua and Michael Hundleby visited the design lab as part of a recent ADHB visit. CEO Ailsa Claire and Andrew Old, along side Lab directors Justin Kennedy-Good and Stephen Reay presented the vision for embedding design in the hospital experience. Its a honour to have visitor like this to the design lab and we appreciate them all taking time to come in and see us!
Over the 2014/2015 Summer period, two spatial design students worked with the ADHB IT department to develop a digital wall space on Level 5. Recently their design for the library corner and bench leaner was fabricated and opened to the public. Take a look at the finished work below:
Recently Guy Collier, an in-house ethnographer and PHD student presented a paper at a design conference in Milan with AUT Professor Amanda Bill.Guy was interviewed on the Radio in Milan about the design lab in Auckland city Hospital:
Conference details can be found below:
CUMULUS Milan 2015 The Virtuous Circle.
Design Culture and Experimentation
The conference aims to investigate how design comes out of the interaction between a practice, which seeks to change the state of things, and a culture, which makes sense of this change. The way this happens evolves with time: practices and cultures evolve and so do the ways they interact; and the attention that is paid at different moments to one or other of these interacting polarities also evolves. In the current period of turbulent transformation of society and the economy, it is important togo back and reflect on the cultural dimension of design, its capacity to produce not only solutions but also meanings, andits relations with pragmatic aspects. Good design does not limit itself to tackling functional and technological questions, but it also always adopts a specific cultural approach that emerges, takes shape and changes direction through a continuous circle of experimenting and reflecting. Because the dimension and complexity of the problems is growing, it is becoming evident that to overcome them it is, above all, necessary to bring new sense systems into play. This is ground on which design, by its very nature, can do much. Indeed, the ability to create a virtuous circle between culture and practical experimentation is, or should be, its main and distinctive characteristic. However, for this really to happen it is necessary to trigger new discussion and reflection about the nature and purpose of design practice and culture. We need to take a step back in history and look at what they were like in the past; then come back to the present and ask ourselves how they have changed and are changing in today’s world in transition. This process could start with some questions, for example: how do the new design practices produce culture? Vice versa, how can this culture orientate and offer common horizons to the multiplicity of practices that take place in design activities? How does this emerging culture tie up with the design tradition of the last century? How can this add depth and consistence to the design culture of the 21st century?
The past two weeks have been busy in the Lab studio; home to 6 design interns. Two spatial designers have worked alongside the ED staff in redesigning their staff base work stations. Through staff engagement, Tanya and Taewoo developed a set of solutions for improving the current layout and presented them back to the ED management team through sketches, renders and plans. See some of their designs and the photos of their presentation:
Casey, Anna.V, Christina and Anna.H from Visual Communications at Auckland University of Technology, worked along side Graphic designer Emme Jacob and Sally Bruce from ADHB comms. The team have developed content for the digital screens recently installed in the Level 5 public space, and is due to be made live by weeks end. Some examples of their work can be found below.
A sincere thank you to all six of you for really owning these two projects - we hope that working on these real world, hospital design opportunities has been an eye opening experience for you all. The Lab has received awesome feedback from your hospital clients and we'd love to see you again very soon!
The sustainable Transport work stream, championed by project managers Phil Schulze and Ian D'Young and run in collaboration with the DHW lab; recently held three workshops with staff and the public. The workshops were set up as forum for discussing ways of improving transport to and from the hospital campus, with a special focus on public transport options.The three workshops have been full, and has been a great opportunity for the sustainable transport project to understand the stories of our people travelling to and from the campus.
Take a look at a few photos below:
Recently, we posted about installing a new set of signage designs for the Transition Lounge ward in the Level 5 public space. The job has been completed along side a awareness campaign for the services offered by the Transition Lounge. A similar exercise is currently underway with ED waiting room to communicate key information and visual cues through simple, bold colour blocking. These hi-fi prototypes are ideal for testing in the hospital and contribute to a more informed approach to way finding hospital wide.
