Chairs with backs along white walls, grey mottled linoleum floors, laminate advice, leaflets on loneliness and cancer treatment, worn magazines on beechwood tables, posters with colourful flowers, a metal bucket for numbers. Functions, materials and an absence of presence you can find in the waiting rooms of any Danish hospital. But at Nærhospitalet Middelfart it will be different.
At Denmark’s first neighbourhood hospital, the ambition is to create a waiting area where you want to wait – and be. It is organised according to best practice design methods, and the Danish Arts Foundation hopes that the initiative can inspire other hospitals, dentists or gynaecologists when planning the spaces where patients meet the institution. They have teamed up with Middelfart Municipality, the design agency Stupid Studio and three craft artists and designers to create a universe that makes visitors linger.
Frighteningly white
In Middelfart, the local hospital is taking shape in a building that housed the former hospital. The idea is to bring together regional and municipal services; psychiatry, somatic outpatient clinics, housing support, jobs and growth, the substance abuse centre and the like in one place. Johanne Østerbye, Programme Manager at Middelfart Nærhospital, calls it a rebellion against the so-called Bermuda Triangle in. healthcare, where tasks fall into an administrative gap between authorities. At Middelfart Local Hospital, patients with widely differing needs will receive coordinated treatment where the individual is at the centre. And that’s how the place should be experienced.
‘What should characterise the local hospital is the collaboration with the patient – and the physical surroundings should help to achieve this. If you’re on a longer programme of consultations in an outpatient clinic, you should want to come here. It shouldn’t be like now, where we’ve learnt from interviews that traditional waiting rooms can be intimidating – so much so that people leave before they’ve even made an appointment. If we can create an environment with art and design that makes people stay longer and achieve their own functionality and quality of life, what we call ‘compliance’, then that would be fantastic,’ says Johanne Østerbye and elaborates that compliance is about, for example, following advice and guidance, attending appointments or taking your pills and thus being able to receive help from the healthcare system.
As a start, Johanne Østerbye and her colleagues organised a public meeting about the new local hospital and interviewed chronically ill, elderly, rehabilitation patients and people with mental health diagnoses about their needs and wishes.
Two things recurred: the waiting room is an important place and the community hospital should be for everyone.
In the autumn of 2023, the Danish Arts Foundation’s Project Support Committee for Craft Artists and Design and Middelfart Municipality joined forces to develop a waiting room that cares for its users.
‘We saw a really good challenge for the design profession: partly across disciplines and initiatives, partly in the meeting between users and the local hospital,’ says service designer and committee member Mette Mikkelsen, who believes that art at the local hospital should ’embrace and make people feel comfortable.’
‘In other places, art should challenge and problematise, but here it’s a welcome zone where you can give patients the feeling that you see them and that they are taken care of before they go in for something that may be uncomfortable. When designing public spaces, it is often forgotten that they will be used by people with very different abilities to enter the space. Especially in a local hospital, where there are many different professional groups and users, this is important to keep in mind.’ Mette Mikkelsen emphasises.
DKK 2 million has been set aside for the initiative, which will serve as a model for how public and private institutions meet their users – and show what designers and craft artists can help with, both in the planning and design phases. Mette Mikkelsen is keen to get it right and calls the initiative ‘an experiment.’ ‘If you do it right, you start by finding out what the users’ needs and dreams are.
Young people are breaking up with the waiting room
If you are anxious, depressed or addicted to drugs, it can be difficult to participate in a programme with others. It can also be difficult to turn up on time, express your needs and tell others what frustrates you and what’s bothering you. So how do you involve users in this situation in a co-creation process for a waiting room? And what can the design profession, design methods and playful facilitation offer in this context?
‘We started by inviting Stupid Studio, who are known for their playful and emotional approach and have a deep understanding of people who are challenged. They used this expertise to derive the attitudes and feelings of a group of young people towards a waiting room and explore what they need. As designers, they use their creative skills and playful approach to explore what we don’t know beforehand and find out what is needed. By experimenting, they also discover knowledge that neither the user nor they themselves knew existed. They have made very concrete suggestions for this,’
explains Mette Mikkelsen.
Facts
Design and communication agency Stupid Studio was responsible for the survey design developed by project director Christine Kragh-Mortensen, designer Jane Kloster and Rebecca Houmøller.
Stupid Studio works with clients that create positive social impact and focus on projects that benefit children, culture and society. Stupid Studio is a certified B Corp.
At Stupid Studio, Jane Kloster, Play Designer & Facilitator, has been the lead designer on the project. She organised a process with a group of young people in vulnerable situations who are otherwise difficult to talk to.
‘Based on our Sensible Futures framework, we planned value-creating interactions. We offered flexible settings where we could have one-on-one conversations, at their homes or other places where they felt safe. Some are connected to a drop-in centre where we could meet and do the tasks together with others they are comfortable with,’ she says, explaining the methods she carefully selected to give young people the opportunity to express themselves with words, images and speech.
‘For us, it was important to use methods that could help young people describe their relationships and feelings towards the waiting room of today and the waiting room of the future. We wrote break-up letters to the waiting room of today to open up some feelings and talk about something abstract in a recognisable language,’ says Jane Kloster.
In the process, the waiting room received some harsh words. A girl named Freja writes that she feels the waiting room ‘drains my life energy out of me. Being with you is exhausting and time becomes strangely slow.’ She feels she loses her identity when ‘they are together’. An anonymous writes that ‘the worst thing about the waiting room’s appearance is ‘that you are cold – uninspiring. Your so-called silence, purity, minimalism, screams in my mental system’ and dreams of ’a waiting room that puts itself in someone else’s shoes.’
When it comes to what young people want, Jane Kloster took them through a guided playful meditation where they imagined the waiting room of the future.
‘We asked them to close their eyes and get comfortable. And then we slowly guided them to ‘open up’ to their imaginations and imagine the waiting room of the future. When they opened their eyes, they experienced things that they probably wouldn’t have realised if we had simply asked them how the waiting room would be different from today. One said there were trees everywhere and a screen with waves crashing. If I had just asked them what their needs were, they might have said better chairs,’ she says and continues:
‘When we use design and the strategic foundation of the profession, we can facilitate a guided conversation that creates a safe environment for the young people and, hopefully, contributes to deeper and more concrete insights. Yet these are not insights that are groundbreaking or only applicable to vulnerable young people. When we talk to vulnerable young people, it’s about their needs being amplified. If we meet their needs, we are in fact meeting the needs we all have – to a greater or lesser extent.’
The dream is a holistic solution
The study has already provided insights that have been incorporated into the local hospital. The waiting area has been expanded and Middelfart Municipality has new methods for involving citizens.
‘We have expanded the area that the craft artists and designers can work with. In addition to the waiting room, we have included a bed car park and a courtyard to which we are creating a door. Here we follow some of the young people’s recommendations to be able to go out and be in contact with nature, even while waiting,’ says Johanne Østerbye and continues:
‘I have also sent the material around the administration so that my colleagues can see how we can gain knowledge from citizens and increase insight. What the young people say goes hand in hand with the other interviews and the literature in the field, which indicates that nature and natural colours help to increase healing. So it has become a universal overlay.’
Facts
The insights from all conversations and activities have been translated into six recommendations for the future waiting room. The six recommendations are:
1. Bring nature inside
2. Visual care
3. Pleasant distractions
4. Let me be anonymous
5. Anything but white
6. Give me peace
The insights have been translated into six recommendations for the future waiting room. They form the basis for the Danish Arts Foundation’s invitation to three designers and craft artists to jointly re-design the waiting room. The Danish Arts Foundation has decided that there should be three different perspectives; an ‘integrated level’ with permanent interventions, a ‘work level’ with works/installations, and an ‘immaterial level’ that supports many different stakeholders’ encounter with and in the local hospital.
‘The artists are selected as an extension of Stupid Studio’s work. This is also how we hope other institutions will think about selecting craft artists and designers in the future, taking the time to see if they understand the project. It’s special that we invite three craft artists and designers who don’t know each other beforehand to collaborate. It’s part of the experiment because we want to bring different competences into the project and create a holistic solution, not just a decoration,’ says Mette Mikkelsen and continues:
‘We have invited Rune Fjord, Christina Augustesen and Marie Retpen to work together to create a universe across their different professional universes. We expect the three of them to challenge each other and contribute to each other’s expertise, and that they would embrace a collaboration.’
The recommendations were handed over to the three craft artists and designers as inspiration. A Miro-board (an online programme for presentations, ed.) brings together the visual material, sound and text so that the craft artists and designers keep the users in mind when rethinking the waiting area and developing works.
At Stupid Studio, Jane Kloster hopes to continue the co-creation process and ‘listen to the users right up to the realisation and opening of the space. We dream of inviting the vulnerable young people in together with the artists, so they can meet each other and the young people can see and feel what they have contributed, how it has been received and how it has been translated.’
Method can benefit many places
The initiative should not only benefit Middelfart, the method should be able to spread throughout the country. According to Mette Mikkelsen, the best results can be achieved if designers and craft artists are involved early in the process.
‘In the committee, we think there is a huge challenge in how we implement, or use art, in public buildings. If you consider the artistic contributions from the start, you can go so much further because you have the opportunity to get to know the place. This collaboration was an opportunity to spend time getting to know the users and understanding their life world before we start creating something new. It is our dream that we create best practice in the field,’ she says, adding that earlier involvement can create better art.
‘By involving designers from the start, we want to create the best conditions for craft artists and designers to challenge themselves and create something new, something far beyond what they could have imagined. And we very much hope that this will fulfil our intention and that of Middelfart Municipality.’
Johanne Østerbye in Middelfart has the same opinion, who feels that the previous collaboration means ‘that craft artists and designers can give their input and that it becomes a real collaboration. We’ve sent them mood boards and design manuals for inspiration, so things will work together. I’m so excited to see how they’ll integrate it into the fact that it’s a wait-and-be space. I hope that the waiting area will be a place where you can sit and have a confidential conversation, and also a place where you can take a step back and reflect. I also hope that volunteers will be attracted to the space and move over here because many studies show how good it is to get out into new communities.’
Theme: Diversity versus Standard
Alongside the desire to express one’s own identity and origins, there is a need to create universal design that can include everyone regardless of physical and mental limitations. Craft artists and design can help create closeness, unity and anchoring.
