KAISER PERMENANTE small Hospital, big Ideas
speculations on the future hospital
The history of the hospital is the history of the obsolete.
Currently as we make them, technology, knowledge, and how we communicate supercede them.
Except for some fragments, this is almost certainly true. We are proposing a radicalized understanding of the hospital.
We see the future hospital is fundamentally an infrastructure designed for the access, control and dissemination of information. as such, the hospital is primarily an interface, and to be of use must provide a myriad of ways, scales, methodologies and venues that the interface can be engaged.
This submission proposes a series of speculations around this interface: how
it may engage the patient, the caregiver, the community, the city. This is a research thread or our practice.
As such, we propose a partial, indicative solution that pinpoints a few speci c issues within the vast world health care design. It exist within a much broader matrix that aspires to deal with more issues.
This is a proposal that outlines a methodology for the design of a future hospital, built around a fragmented, uid, responsive, almost in nite catalogue of solutions, moments, relationships and understandings that can be composed
to suit any number of situations and constraints.
The point of this catalogue is twofold.
Firstly, if we have a clear understanding of how the fragments operate and work, we can ‘deconstruct’ their effects. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it is to demonstrate a latent potential.
Knowing how the fragments can evolve and be made to distribute or recombine, we have the ability, to not only mitigate the effect of some of the negative associated connotations, but produce ‘mutations’ to counter the negative effects; we can in uence, and to some extent, control for the positive outcomes.
We are proposing a ‘system’. A system for evaluation, design and implementation of the work.
This phase of the work proposes a partial matrix.
Framed around information leading to ideas, developed as
compositions, and de ning the fragmented hospital.
information the fundamental issue in any technologically based endevour over the last thirty years has been the exponential increase in information and its access. this is fundamental to the rapidly changing context of healthcare delivery.
it creates ux this proposal embraces and frames this ux with a radicalized architecture.
idea catalogue 300 fragments towards a new hospital the proposal posits a catalogue of ideas, potentially hundreds.
these ideas become a matrix of potential solutions for a vast and varied architectural problem. some are speculation, some are notions, some are ideologies.
compositions these fragments merge and deform. certain components merge in contexts that require it. simple context require straightforward interventions. complex convergences create complex solutions. context informs solutions and the solution goes on to inform the context. The implicit shifting within this loop is what de nes the fragmented hospital. It is in ux, and this ux is primary to its meaning.
fragmented hospital the fragmented hospital is a critical construct. For us, this means the critical process is embedded in all aspects of this work.