Client
D/DOCK
Completion
2023
Collaborators
Schola
Applied principles
Magic Hospital is a research project. Using the Speculative Design approach and generative artificial intelligence as a tool for giving shape to our ideas, we were able to explore alternative scenarios of an institution that has been looking the same for decades, perpetrating similar spatial features, patterns, actions, and issues, too.
Why is the hospital the way it is?
What if it was different from how we know it?
Despite modern developments of science and technology have given humanity better life expectancies, and more efficient environments, and despite healthcare professionals dedicate every day to help people in need, we still experience that the system has failed us.
Hospitals are still places where we don’t want to be, factories that reduce people to bodies to be processed. The emotional side effects that the unfriendliness of healthcare facilities provokes in staff, patients, and loved ones are more and more coming forward and have negative consequences on the healing process. Doctors and staff are dressed as scientists. The space design is characterised by aseptic aesthetics, and artificial lights, and while maximising efficiency and hygiene, it forgets workers’ and patients’ wellbeing. Rituals, social bonds, and spirituality are considered mere suppletive details.
We believe that adding new visions and values to the contemporary hospital, and combining them with efficiency, would bring us to new scenarios where we could finally embrace wellness, illness, healing and death with a new inner balance.
What if the hospital ..
From process to ritual
