Design, Healthcare, What's Up
February 1, 2012
By David Foster
Physicians and nurses work through a space planning exercise. Photo: Joint Commission Resources
The design process can be overwhelming if you’re unfamiliar with its various phases, tools, and lingo. A new workshop aims to give healthcare professionals the skills to positively influence patient safety and quality during the design and construction of future healthcare environments.
Learning to read blueprints, articulate a future vision, and design for flexibility, these and other skills are covered in the Safe Health Design Learning Academy. This three-day session is organized by Joint Commission Resources (JCR)—a not-for-profit healthcare accreditation organization—and sponsored by Herman Miller.
Giving physicians, nurses, and healthcare leadership an active voice in the design of healthcare will result in safer spaces, better patient care, and satisfied caregivers—all noble goals.
The next JCR Safe Health Design Learning Academy will be held in April 23-25, 2012; sign up now.
Better World, Design, Healthcare
November 8, 2011
By Angelina Spaniolo
“If we think about architecture as simply beautiful objects,” says Michael Murphy, founding partner of Mass Design Group, “then we fail to talk about the process which creates those objects. It’s labor—the construction of craft—that produces beauty.”
Consider Butaro Hospital in Rwanda, an example of MASS Design’s belief in first-rate healthcare facilities for the third world and investing in the local economy as a means of breaking the cycle of poverty. For Butaro’s wall construction, local Rwandans became the masons: hand-chipping volcanic rock and beautifully shaping each piece so they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Built 100 percent by the community, Butaro’s walls are as much symbolic as they are functional. They testify to a community that labored together, using newly learned skills, to build a hospital for themselves.
Patients benefit from their labors, too, in the design of the hospital. Placing beds in the center, making each bed a window seat creates a positive patient experience. An innovative airflow design minimizes the spread of airborne diseases.
Butaro Hospital is functional, innovative, and beautiful. But, to the community, its best design was the process by which it was created.
Herman Miller is excited about working together with MASS. Learn more here.
Design, Healthcare
October 17, 2011
By David Foster
The paint has dried and the doors have opened on a new Herman Miller Healthcare Customer Experience Center that engages and inspires.
To engage visitors, we designed plenty of hands-on experiences. We encourage customers to interact with and experiment with products. Visitors can try the Oasis overbed table while lying in bed. They can rearrange the modular tiles of the Compass System and see first-hand the Herman Miller Performance System.
Inspiration comes in the form of settings—from waiting rooms, to patient rooms, as well as laboratories. Visitors see thoughtful, realistic solutions to their problems, as well as many that really make them think.
Engaging and inspiring, the aim of our Customer Experience Center is to help people realize the power of space.
Design, Healthcare
August 15, 2011
By David Foster
Gianfranco Zaccai pretends to be a lot of things: Chinese parent, a basketball player, and a child with diabetes to name a few. When asked to work on a healthcare project, Zaccai and his team at Continuum, the design consultancy he co-founded, built a fake hospital room and pretended to be hospital patients. Why? “To empathize,” replied Zaccai in a recent Wall Street Journal article.
Zaccai isn’t interested in producing a “better” healthcare product—his goal is to create a better healthcare experience. Which is exactly what he and Continuum achieved in the Compass modular furniture system for Herman Miller Healthcare. More than 550 clinicians, hospital administrators, architects, and designers were interviewed to find the most important unmet needs in how patient and exam rooms are designed now. The result was a deep understanding of what makes a better experience for everyone involved: the patient, the caregiver, the family, and the administrator. Because, as Zaccai says, “The opportunity for innovation is finding the sweet spot where needs overlap.”
Design, Healthcare
July 11, 2011
By David Foster
Good design addressed needs, and in healthcare—where patients, nurses, doctors, and support staff are all interacting in one environment—there are a lot of people with a lot of different needs. Gary Cruce, design principle at Nemschoff, understands this and the award-winning Oasis overbed table is a result.
Gary and I recently had an opportunity to talk about the design of Oasis.
What are some of the issues relating to overbed tables?
There are a lot of different people competing for the same small space on an overbed table. For patients, it is often the only place they can reach and store things while sitting in bed. Nurses use part of the table for setup and prep when they are in the room. And then, threes times a day it’s cleared to hold a food tray.
Research was a part of the project early on, and we worked closely with Kerrie Cardon, a nurse consultant with Herman Miller Healthcare. A photo survey she put together, for example, really helped us understand all of the ways [an overbed table] was being used.
How did this understanding translate into the design of Oasis?
We started by creating a top with a low-walled space at one end to better organize items, but without being too prescriptive and creating cup holders and niches for specific items. It’s easy to move things there when the nurse is working or the food tray arrives. On the column you sometimes find a box of some kind; we designed a small tray instead, which we left open for easy access and visibility. We added tall edges to the tray to keep things from falling off.
Read more
Design, Healthcare, Innovation
May 6, 2011
By Doug Bazuin
“Companies prosper when they tap into a power that every one of us already has – the ability to reach outside of ourselves and connect with other people, to walk in someone else’s shoes.” That’s Dev Patnaik, author of Wired to Care , speaking. He believes empathy is key to innovation. And everyone from marketing to R&D benefits from a better understanding of their customers and end users.
We agree. Empathy plays an important role in Herman Miller research, design, and development of new products, particularly in healthcare. We gain empathy by engaging with nurses and other caregivers in multiple ways. Facility tours, focus groups, gaming sessions, and job shadowing help us develop insight into the work of caregivers, to really understand what they do, what their work day is like. We then do our best to share those experiences with product development teams through reports, hallway conversations, and workshops.
We believe products like Compass express the empathy we have with caregivers, patients, families, and administrators.
Healthcare, What's Up
April 20, 2011
By David Foster
A new Herman Miller experience is taking shape as we put the final touches on our new Healthcare Experience Center. The new space, conceived as a holistic experience that begins the moment guests arrive, was a year in the making.
The Center and its adjoining spaces are the collaborative result of healthcare experts, architects, designers, nurse consultants, salespeople, our customer experience team, and many more—a true team effort.
Covering the entire continuum of care, the Center demonstrates Herman Miller Healthcare’s human-centered approach to product development and shows the range of solutions that Herman Miller Healthcare and Nemschoff provide.
Healthcare
March 10, 2011
By Mollie Everett
Hospital professionals are always looking to improve the care they deliver and do so more efficiently. Many think standards are the answer, especially in patient room design. But a question quickly arises: Which approach—same-handed or mirror-image design—is better for patient safety and staff efficiency?
Why the debate? Mirror-image rooms like the one below share plumbing chases and medical gas and electrical lines. That’s efficient from an architectural point of view.
On the other hand, same-handed rooms like the one below don’t share chases and lines. That adds about $3,000 to $5,000 to the cost of each patient room.
Even with this added cost, an increasing number of hospitals are choosing same-handed design. They’re doing because they believe that standardized same-handed design contributes to better process and workflow. Trouble is, there’s very little evidence to support this belief.
So the debate goes on. We think it’s a healthy debate because it focuses attention on the important role design plays in patient-room settings. It’s generating new research into the merits of same-handed versus mirror-image design, too.
This is all good, but in all the research and all the talk, let’s not lose sight of the people who deliver care. Too much standardizing in the name of efficiency—prescribing, for example, their approach (either left or right) to patients—may backfire if we don’t involve them in the discussion.
Photos 2 & 3 credit: HKS Architects
Design, Healthcare, Products
February 28, 2011
By Bill Holm
Photo via Popular Science
Think about crutches. Most of us don’t until we experience the difficulty and discomfort of using them. Crutches can damage nerves, arteries, and tissue, and it’s easy to slip and cause more pain or more injury.
Here’s a better way. It’s called Mobilegs, from Mobi, a Minneapolis-based designer of mobility products. Mobi, born out of Studio Weber + Associates, seeks to transform our perception and function of mobility devices like crutches, making them more comfortable, better-designed, and more customizable.
Mobilegs is so innovative, it was named Best of What’s New for Health for 2010 by Popular Science magazine, which reads, “Mobilegs takes the design to the 21st century with modern materials and careful attention to ergonomic factors (which should come as no surprise given that their inventor helped design the Aeron chair).”
That inventor is Jeff Weber, of Studio + Weber, who also designed Herman Miller’s Embody chair, Caper chair, and Envelop desk. “I work to humanize the relationship between people, products, and the world around us,” Jeff says. He was inspired by a 2005 foot injury that made him all too aware of the crutch problem. “The traditional crutch was not designed to accommodate the mechanics of the human body. Mobilegs does just that.”
Design, Healthcare
February 25, 2011
By Keasha Palmer
As a company committed to improving healthcare environments through better design, Herman Miller is pleased to tell you about how one man’s idea turned into a wonderful addition to the new Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
It’s all about art. Kids’ art.
The idea, which originated with Dr. Bob Connors, head of the hospital, was to fill the facility with art created for and by children. And when the doors opened in January, more than 600 original creations, by nearly 9,000 West Michigan-area children, decorated the 14-floor facility.
“It was truly a community effort,” said Scott LaFontsee of LaFontsee Galleries/Underground Studios, who helped coordinate the huge effort that involved schools and other organizations as well as local artists who volunteered to help.
“When kids come to this place, they know it’s a children’s place,” said Dr. Connors, who was extremely pleased with the outcome.
Photo credit: Emily Zoladz, The Grand Rapids Press