The cloud project
Harnessing the healing power of nature in the health care environment.
A student group project at the Glasgow school of art innovation school, September 2018
Caroline Inckle, Han Bao, Junfu Deng, Yun Xu
Have you ever spent time in an institutional environment such as a hospital or airport and then gazed out of the window and seen a tree or birds flying by or maybe clouds drifting past and then felt calm and back in touch with the fact that you are connected to a bigger world, and a beautiful one at that?
I had this experience recently when returning from a trip abroad into Glasgow airport. Most of the interior of the building was grey or white with long corridors designed to herd people like sheep to the appropriate destination as quickly as possible. Waiting in queues airports can be a soul destroying experience, but this was a little different, in one short section of the queueing area the walls were covered floor to ceiling with images of trees which made it feel like we were standing in a forest. Sounds of birds and the movement of trees and wind were also playing over speakers to add to the experience. Of course, although this is far from a real experience of standing in the forest, but I was struck by how quickly my body responded. I felt noticeably more relaxed and at ease and happy to simply stand there and wait for my turn.
A Norwegian study published in the international journal of environment and public health in 2009 backs up this anecdotal evidence and concludes that visual contact with nature can impact positively on health and wellbeing (Grinde and Patil, 2009). We took this along with other research which looks into the use of VR technologies in hospital environments to explore the role ‘cloud gazing’ could play in supporting the wellbeing of hospital patients throughout their patient journey.
We wanted to explore a range of technological and analogue approaches to look at how nature based interventions could support patients towards health at each stage of their journey from admission to continuing with a healthy life style home.
First maybe I should set the scene. During the first two weeks of our masters of design innovation course we were tasked with a short ‘Ice breaker’ project in which to speculate design outcomes which ‘explore relationships to clouds’ so, a fairly wide open brief to play with. We were a group of four students who had only briefly met, we knew nothing about each other’s skills or backgrounds and for three of the group English was not their first language, so communication through discussion was pretty tricky.
I share this to illustrate how even in circumstances where collaboration may not seem straight forward, having some understanding of creative process and having a few key design thinking tools to work with can go a long way in directing productive results.
We discovered that we had in our team a visual artist with experience of community engagement & collaboration (me!), a gifted software engineer (Han), an app developer and inventive doodler (Junfu) and a brilliant visual communicator with experience of using design thinking tools in a business context (Yun). Perfect! Armed with a diagram of Pugh’s design funnel and a handful of adapted SPRINT tools we set to work.
By the end of the two weeks we had a speculative design to present to our peers which aimed to harness the healing power of nature within the healthcare environment and looked at ways to integrate varying degrees of contact with nature throughout the patient journey from admission to continuing a healthy and active lifestyle on their return home.
The key elements of the design were:
A VR experience the hospital bed which links to a home garden, favourite outdoor spot or the view of the sky from the hospital garden.
A cloud viewing installation sited in the hospital garden where patients can visit as they become more mobile.
A network of cloud spotting groups affiliated with the cloud appreciation society so people can continue to support health and wellbeing through social activities on their return home.
These elements are connected by an app which helps patients to access the various parts of the project as well as track their progress on health and wellbeing indicators such as mobility and social interaction throughout their patient journey.
Okay, so this was just an initial icebreaker project to help us settle into the course and get us prototyping, working together and having fun. If we took this particular project forward it would of course need many more rounds of iteration and in-depth user centred research within the hospital environment. However, we did manage to achieve the bare bones of a project in 10 days from start to finish and the process taught me a few key things.
· Knowing innovation process is really helpful in effective project planning and understanding where best to direct energy at each stage.
· Knowing creative process is really helpful riding the natural wave of diversion and conversion / expansion and contraction with some level of grace
· Knowing design thinking tools can help super charge the process of generating and evaluating ideas collaboratively.
And finally…
· Creating together can be energising and fun
· And a good understanding of process and effective time management fuels this creative energy.
These building blocks of how to create together can be applied anywhere people what to harness their natural capacity to create with others and utilise diverse skills to make great things happen fast.
Whether in the classroom or the boardroom creating together should be fun, inclusive, energising and impactful. We are all innately creative and with the application of a few simple processes and tools we can scale up our creative capacity and think big by working together.
References:
Cedars-Sinai medical centre, (2019). [image] Available at: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yLpe_DwsqFE [Accessed 27 Nov. 2019]
Grinde, B. and Patil, G. (2009). Biophilia: Does Visual Contact with Nature Impact on Health and Well-Being?. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 6(9), pp.2332–2343
For Pugh’s funnel see:
Greenberg, S. and Buxton, W. (2012). Sketching user experiences. Waltham, MA: Morgan Kaufmann
Knapp, J., Zeratsky, J. and Kowitz, B. (2016). Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days. London: Bantam press
