Visualisations and Calculations of Spaces: Negotiating Hospital Design During On-boarding

There is a complex relationship between the use of visualisations, and the production of both designs and physical spaces. In the case of hospitals, technical, aesthetic and practice-based requirements are incorporated into negotiations around facilities, layout and operation, and a plethora of stakeholders are engaged in the process. This paper describes a case of the ‘on-boarding’ phase in the design of a new hospital in North Zealand, Denmark. It describes the use of various visualisations in the engagement of actors concerned with managing the budget and delivering the building programme as well as the eventual users of the hospital. It reveals how visualisations are mobilised to form different and overlapping types of spaces. These are described as economic spaces, concerned with maintaining the economic budget frame, when the client organization is communicating the project and the design to healthcare practitioners at the hospital; design spaces, which include forms of user involvement, when the design team is developing and testing a methodology for engaging with medical staff; organizational spaces, concerning the connection between new physical spaces and healthcare professionals, when members of the project organization work with the aim of facilitating organizational changes in the way health care is delivered at the hospital. Finally the paper discusses how these spaces are connected, and how they both enable and constrain innovation in design and healthcare.