Workshop with Silver Thomas Hanley (STH) Healthcare Architects
Many of us have experience of attending workshops, producing innovative ideas that we think have tremendous potential, and then being disappointed when these ideas don’t seem to be taken forward by the project. This is something we at NOVELL want to change. As part of the living-lab methodology, the NOVELL Redesign project is focused on linking contributions in our blue-sky-thinking workshops in Stage 1 (Concept Design in the image below) with the design innovation challenges that are taken forward in Stage 2 (Prototype Design in the image below). An important part of this is working out which ideas will have the largest impact on improving rehabilitation environments.
Image: The NOVELL Redesign Process mapped against a Design Science approach
One of the ways we are doing this is by testing these ideas with our industry partners. Silver Thomas Hanley (STH) Health Architecture is a partner in the NOVELL Redesign project with over 40 years of experience in healthcare architecture. Having completed over 2000 projects in that time, STH has a fantastic understanding of the complexities of healthcare architecture and a great understanding of industry best-practice. Some the projects they have been involved in include Bendigo Hospital, the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and the Gold Coast University Hospital. You can read more about the work that STH does here.
Having finalised our analysis of the Stage 1 workshop outputs using an Inductive Thematic Analysis process, we translated these into a series of cards that we linked with both the fundamental objectives of rehabilitation that were defined in Lipson-Smith et al. (2019) (effectiveness, efficiency, safety and wellbeing), and an updated set of means objectives for rehabilitation (the ways we achieve the fundamental objectives). These cards were then used as the building blocks for a series of design briefs that were taken into the workshop session with STH.
Image: Example card from workshop session showing content from thematic analysis (left), links to means objectives (numbered list lower-right) and the relationship with the fundamental objectives (upper-right)
On Friday 18 June 2021, staff from Silver Thomas Hanley in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide offices came together with members from the NOVELL Redesign team for a workshop to explore the ideas we are taking forward into Stage 2 of the NOVELL Redesign project. Although initially planned as a series of face-to-face workshops in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, we shifted online in response to ongoing gathering restrictions, using the Miro platform that we had used in the first stage of NOVELL Redesign.
In the workshop, we reviewed some pre-assembled briefs in terms of how innovative they were, and whether there were examples of the principles in these briefs being addressed in existing rehabilitation projects, or indeed in existing healthcare projects more generally. We then turned to the construction of new briefs, providing participants with the opportunity to look at how the themes could be combined to deliver innovation in rehabilitation environments. What we found is that although there were many examples of individual elements being designed successfully, it was the unique combinations of these ideas that had emerged from the Stage 1 workshop series that has the potential to drive innovation in rehabilitation design.
The results from this workshop were then used to refine the design briefs that we have taken into our Above the Line / Below the Line process that we are using to determine the priorities for Stage 2 of NOVELL Redesign. We will be sharing some of the highlights of this prioritisation in an upcoming blog post.