Design a hospital space that allows researchers to answer the question, “With X new technology or treatment, could we have sent this child home sooner?”
The name “Living Laboratory” comes from the rooms dual functionality. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta needed us to design a room in which they can test new technology, medical devices, & treatments, while maintaining the functionality for, & comfort of, the patient and visitors. In addition, the room needed to be able to reconfigure- from an ICU to an In-patient room to a home simulation space & back. Children’s Heath care of Atlanta is currently preparing to build a new location in Atlanta, & our Living Lab fits inside this already established floor plan, with a few tweaks.
Understanding current hospital rooms
We visited Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta’s (CHOA) Egleston campus to see what they are working with currently, observe nurses & doctors in action, & understand how patients move from one level of acuity to the next (ICU, In-patient, home).
Task delegation
Knowing we had a huge project ahead of us, my studio split into 3 teams so that we could tackle each area more thoroughly. I worked with the Room Experience & Patient Visitor Experience Teams.
Insights + Concepts
After generating a huge breadth of insights and concepts for how to achieve room reconfigurability, we down-selected by linking concepts based on how they answer key questions about the space.
Concept Validation
We presented our early concepts to research & nursing directors in from CHOA to see if our thinking & ideas matched their vision & resonated with some of the people who could make these concepts come to life.
Bringing the Room Together
Now that we had an idea of the technology & systems going into the room, I led the effort to determine the physical aspects of our design. Using sketches drawn over the existing floor plan, we constructed low fidelity 1/12 scale model of the space so that we could quickly move walls and equipment mock ups into the various configurations & create new ideas. This let us simulate room transitions, & more tangibly assess which designs showed promise.
Selecting a floor plan
Design should be grounded in facts & rationality, so the final floor plan was chosen by comparing each concept to each other and the original design in key areas to determine which best solved the design issues at hand.
What goes where?
With the floor plan decided, We figured out what equipment needed to go where based on the needs of Doctors, parents, Nurses, & patients.
Final Work
1/12 Scale Model
To illustrate our concepts to the CHOA staff. We made a scale model using foamcore, acrylic, a sheet metal floor, & magnets so that they could move furniture and people around during our presentation,