Supporting Sensing Spaces of Healthcare to explore how to improve hospital environments for children and young people and people on maternity wards

 
Two people working on a worksheet in a workshop

Project aims:

Inclusively worked with Sensing Spaces of Healthcare to help run research workshops to inform future design briefs to improve hospital experiences.

Inclusively ran two workshops one with children and young people at Great Ormond Street Hospital and one in a maternity ward in Bristol. These workshops built on previous research and created a space for ideation with users to help form future design briefs.

 

Project background:

Sensing Spaces of Healthcare (SSH) is an ongoing UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) funded research project (2020–24) carried out in partnership with the hospital arts organizations Fresh Arts (North Bristol NHS Trust) and GOSH Arts (Great Ormond Street Hospital, London). SSH is focused on exploring the sensory past, present and future of NHS (National Health Service) hospitals in England to identify ways in which specific hospital environments may be enhanced.

 

“I really liked 100 ways to squeeze a lemon and how it foreshadowed the upcoming activities, so all in all I really liked the workshop.”

“We could use our creativity and nothing was too ‘abstract’ ”

“Really fun and engaging workshop, thank you”

- Research participants

 
Worksheet that maps out experience of visiting a hospital

Our approach

We reviewed and synthesised the previous research conducted across the various hospital settings and used these to help inform the focus of the workshops and the activities. 

We created the workshops to focus on:

  • Mapping experiences and what people want to improve about hospital environments

  • Creating ideas for improvements

  • Sharing peoples ideas 

 
person drawing hospital room on a worksheet

The workshops

We created some broad ‘How might we’s’ from previous research to help focus the ideation sessions. 

  1. How might we improve places where you wait to make them more playful and enjoyable?

  2. How might we create private, safe, and calm spaces for moments when you need them?

  3. How might we make hospital experiences work better for people's different sensory needs and preferences?

We started off with some quick ideation activities to get everyone feeling creative, then we focused on experience mapping and then jumped into ideating around participants’ chosen areas of focus.

 
 
Four slides showing user needs and ideas collected from workshops
 
filled in worksheet from workshop showcasing someones idea to improve hospital envionments

Outcomes and impact

We created a summary of key findings from both workshops and used this to identify opportunity areas for improvement. We worked with the SSH team to prioritise these opportunity areas and used them to create design briefs to help the SSH team to find people to help build and conduct further research and usability testing to create solutions to meet user needs. 

 

Learnings

The activity sheets that we created really helped participants to map out their experiences and frame their ideation. We had some really positive feedback about how actionable and tangible it felt.

We also got some of the best responses to the quick ideation activity ‘How to squeeze a Lemon’ that we have ever had, one was squeezing a lemon by having a stampede of chihuahuas run over it.

A big thanks to the SSH team and all of our wonderful research participants!

Client: Sensing Spaces of Healthcare

Services: Service Design, User Research, Design Research

Team: Charley Pothecary, Lucy Stewart