How to move around in a “hospital city”
The university hospital strasbourg is unique in France. Composed of six hospital areas spread in Strasbourg, the major one occupy 13 hectares of the city. It is a close space, a hospital city inside the Strasbourg’s city.
We led a three weeks investigation about traveling inside this hospital city of Strasbourg with Suzanne Husson (graphic designer), Aurélie Roure (space designer) and me, the product designer of the group. The point of this investigation was to find the major problems of moving around in Strasbourg’s hospital. By exploring the place and meeting its users, we wanted to bring awareness on possible answers with a multitude of ideas that could be realised within a short or long period of time.
The hospital city function quite like a city, with roads, streets, traffic sign, sidewalks, etc. Nobody really thought about this hospital traffic, they just did the same as in a regular city, however we thought it should be specific to the medical field. How do you want to move in such a big hospital?
To answer this question we divided the work into three steps:
Feel: First we took our own feelings, our own observations as explorers and designers of the place into account. We discovered that cars are unfortunately mainly use, some just cross the hospital city to avoid traffic in Strasbourg, it forbids anyone who want to have a nice walk or a enjoy break outside buildings. They are a lot of historic monument, a big touristic potential, which is not very developed. At least we found out there are a lot of unused streets, cars and bicycle drive only in three or four roads. This information allows us to find a direction for our project: Strasbourg’s hospital needs to be more pedestrian, less saturated / more peaceful, less pollutant / more open, less centralised.
Communicate: we wanted to create projects for the present and future users of the place. Moving around in a hospital concerns patients but also visitors, health professionals, other workers, tourists, etc. We designed communication and data collection tools. The first tool was an interactive map, it helped us understand how the place works, where are the most crowded places, which path is always empty, which path is the most crowded. The other tool is also a map, or more a graphic. We tried to know how users were feeling when they were moving around in the hospital, we ask people we met to put an elastic through the feeling they encounter when moving int the hospital: Visitors are anxious, patients are bored, and professionals are in a hurry. We also met the security agents who are already in charge of transportation in the hospital, they told us how they mange the cars, and how people do not respect the traffic rules when they are driving in the hospitals. Those tools gave us precious information about uses of the place but also made us meet people easily.
Think: with all this information, we imagine new ways to move around the hospital: close some street and transform them into parks, medical garden, playground for kids or outside sport facilities; create a touristic walks with new signage, an orientation circuit, and other pedagogy equipment; bring tramway and buses inside the hospital; create elevated bridge for patient to move from a building to another without crossing unwanted cars; create adapted sidewalk for disabled patients; and other project that you can discover on the drawings…
Some of those projects are utopian but some are realistic as well, on the short or long term.
All this work was an exhibition which took place in the Gaujot city (14 rue du Maréchal Juin, 67 000, Strasbourg) in February. Elected representatives of Strasbourg and the hospital where invited to the exhibition, we focus there attention on problems we detect and solutions we offer.
Une enquête de trois semaines menée par Suzanne Husson (designer graphique), Aurélie Roure (designer espace) et Elín elín (designer produit) sur le thème du déplacement au sein de la cité hospitalière de Strasbourg. Le but de cette enquête est de relever les problèmes majeurs en prenant contact avec le lieu et ses utilisateurs mais aussi d’ouvrir le champ des possibles en proposant une multitude d’idées à court ou long terme.
La démarche s’articule autour de trois actions :
Ressentir, ce sont nos propres ressentis, nos propres observations en tant qu’humain et designer qui sont tout d’abord pris en compte. Ces informations nous permettent d’orienter notre travail à venir.
Communiquer, nous souhaitons nous adresser à tous les usagers actuels et futurs de la cité, le déplacement au sein du lieu concerne tous les types d’usagers (patients, visiteurs, touristes, professionnel…). Pour cela nous imaginons et créons des outils de communication et de collecte d’informations. Le premier pour connaître les lieux de passages les plus fréquentés et un autre pour découvrir le sentiment de l’usager durant le déplacement. Nous cherchons aussi a échanger avec des professionnels qui s’occupent déjà du déplacement, les agents de sécurités.
Penser, toutes les informations collectées nous permettent alors de poser des problématiques, une cité :plus piétonnière, moins saturé - plus calme, moins polluante - plus ouvertes, moins centralisé. Auquel nous répondons avec des idées ouvertes réalisables à court ou long terme.
Travaux exposés à la cité Gaujot (67 000 - Strasbourg) jusqu’au 22 février.
