My background is in financial design, but for a long time I've been exploring more spacial
issues in my work. And so I've been working on exhibition designs, interior designs, furniture
installations and public art installations. My work is primarily about function but I'm very
much interested in adding something to the work that is beyond function, something that
is sculptural and sometimes also interactive. Humour to a certain extent is important in
my work. I wouldn't it's laugh out loud humour, but I think I'm very interested in creating
a dialogue between the work and the user. When I'm given a brief I try to rewrite the
brief for myself to find certain points of problems and then try and find solutions for them.
And t he solutions, they kind of go in different ways. Some of them are purely functional,
so I work a lot with plans and spacial awareness and how people move around the space and how,
kind of, sizes fit within a space. Every project is very different which is something that
I very much enjoy. But it also throws up different challenges. In some cases the site specific nature
of the project requires me to research, um, the space a lot or the people that use it a lot.
In the past I've had to research the habitations of bats and in other cases
it's been like how schoolchildren behave in a school. And so this project has been really
interesting because it's been a patient and staff relationship that so far I hadn't explored.
So I very much enjoyed the beginning of this project because initially I didn't do any
design for several months. I've just spent a lot of time in meetings and finding out
through the client what is really required for the building. We are trying to create
a hospital that's very different from normal hospitals. And that, kind of, the entrance
point of the hospital is important and different. And how can this be different but at the same
time not alienating for the staff and patients in particular. And so I kind of liked unpicking this
and trying to make sense of it. And through these discussions, finding that perhaps what's
most important is the privacy of patients when they're talking to the staff and checking
in and they're coming into this new environment. And the space, especially in the welcome village,
is very open and, as much as we try and want to keep some of that openness, I think it's
also important to create spaces within the space. In order to create privacy for the
patients when they're checking in, I'm exploring the idea of seating clusters. And these seating
clusters will have screens around them which are translucent. These screens would be layered
throughout the space so that we get a layering of colour and different visual impacts which
kind of create a sculptural quality within the space. The initial brief for the reception
area included a kitchen table. Part of my exploration is to see how this kitchen table
might work and whether really a kitchen table as such is the best solution. And if we do
have this table area, does it really need to be a large, massive kitchen table, which is
something that you usually associate with one large group. Or is it more a case of having
clusters of tables that are linked together so that they reflect the nature of maybe several
individual conversations. I think, for me, it is important that it's a cancer centre
and that you are dealing with patients and people who are, um. not well or recovering
or anxious or, you know, that are coming into this space with a different set of issues
than if you were designing an exhibition in a museum or coffee shop. And as much as I
don't want them to focus on, how does this work and what is the design and what is the
art in here, I want them to move through the space with a kind of awareness of care having
been taken with the environment and that someone is thinking of them and trying to make their
journey pleasant and special. The mind is a very powerful thing and let's start with
the mind the minute we step into the building.