Constructing Healthcare Spaces: The Complex Role of Visualisations in Negotiating Hospital Designs and Practices

The aim of this paper is to inquire into the role of project visualisations in shaping healthcare spaces and practices. The study draws upon an ethnographic field study from a large on-going hospital construction project in Denmark, and focuses on the early phases of on-boarding the design team into the project organisation. The theoretical contribution concerns the ways in which project visualisations plays an active role in developing novel conceptions of space and how these are mobilized in the process of on-boarding, in terms of 1. Design space (especially the engagement of users in the design process), 2.Organisational space (work processes and their spatial-temporal dimension) and; 3. Economic space (cost estimations and budgets). In practice, our findings show that the visualisations of different yet connected project spaces and the development of future clinical practices is related to a number of emergent concerns in the processes of designing and constructing the new hospital, notably concerns and tensions between innovation and control.