This assignment comes from a cooperation between the Rietveld Academy’s DesignLab and the Zaans Medisch Centrum in Zaandam, Netherlands.
Through the studies of different care environments, it is known by now, that social practice dramatically alter the meanings of places and people’s relationship to them. Also the creation of patient groups and/or diseases helps on defining the needs and wishes of these same groups as it improves the social activity between the patients.
Bearing in mind the dichotomy “Home vs Institution”, I aimed on supplying a platform for social interaction to the hospital of Zaandam. Certain elements like rocking chairs, inserted in an institutional environment underline it with meanings of a relaxed homey interior, more favorable for social practice. Modular rocking chairs connected together form a dialogue in motion between the users, where the distance between the chairs is always mantained whether alone or with somebody.
A platform that benefits from the social relations there created, in order to be the starting point of a more group-focused health care system.
materials: wood,pleather,foam,aluminium
prototypes, 2006
photo: Anu Vahtra