Art, design, and the healing environment

The project
To design a new dedicated day care Oncology centre at Kingston Hospital. The new centre is for life-limiting Paediatric patients who make frequent hospital visits for the administration of programmed chemotherapy.

The designed space includes consulting rooms, treatment rooms, meeting rooms, reception area and corridors.

Our objectives
To bring a high-level of design and creativity to a clinical space where children are required to spend long periods of time across frequent visits, in order to:
/ create a calming and distracting environment that positively contributes to the experience and treatment of the patients
/ reduce stress and anxiety for them, their parents and families and,
/ provide staff with a day-to-day environment which they feel at home in, comfortable and proud of.

Our solution: Other worlds
Spending frequent, long periods of time in a place that can be intimidating and stressful could become a reality that would get a little too much for all of us. We designed Other worlds to be a gentle escape, a distraction from that reality.

Through our illustrations, the idea of Other worlds is to take our patients from their reality to a world fired by the imagination, boundless and filled with unexpected and wonderful things.

To achieve this, our in-house designers created a series of magical illustrations that on instant viewing appear as scenes, of a forest, of the sea, space, but with time and imagination, reveal themselves to be gateways to other, secret worlds.

For our patients and their families, quite literally, worlds away from where they are right now.

What we delivered
Across the project we completed the following tasks:

  1. consultation, interviews and focus groups with patients, staff, and families to agree the creative brief
  2. mood boarding a range of concepts that developed into the overall creative theme
  3. designing that theme into the ward environment using in-house generated, bespoke, illustration
  4. management of all suppliers across the project plus the print and production of all physical assets
  5. on-site direction of all aspects of installation and project fulfilment.

Creative designers, art directors and illustrators in our own right, Sable combine this with over 20yrs technical experience working with NHS development and arts teams, project managing all aspects of the brief, production and installation of NHS art and designed-environment projects.

Sable&Hawkes
The Complete Environment Design Service
Creative Design | Production Management | Installation