Changing behaviour with visual cues.

I had the opportunity to volunteer at a local hospital for a few hours a week, monitoring visitors to the Critical Care Neurosurgery Unit.  This unit is locked behind a set of double-doors. It’s locked for security, hygienic and privacy reasons. All hospital and volunteer staff have card access only.

Volunteer’s task:

1. Determine the needs of the visitor and call the appropriate health care pod and nurse
    
2. If entrance is permitted, the magnetic locks are released, the visitors are instructed on hand hygiene, then allowed to enter
    
3. If permission to enter is not granted at the time of request, visitors are asked to wait in the adjacent waiting rooms until signalled to enter

The Observation:

Visitors will often congregate outside the unit entrance, waiting for staff to enter or exit, then rush in whenever some exits the doors. Hospital staff will not interfere with their entry since they will not be aware of which visitors have been given permission to enter the unit.

View fullsize

Bird's eye view of the Visitor's section and Intensive Care Unit entrance way.

The doors in question are the same colour as the hallway walls. They are also plastered in signs and notes of various sizes. Many of these signs are office-printer-generated and poorly designed. They are tattered, inconsistently multi-lingual and badly placed. The doors are dented, scuffed and dirty. In effect the doors have been “corporately graffitied” and as such appear to be the entrance way to some cafeteria rather than protecting a highly sensitive healthcare suite. 

Design intervention:

If the doors were stripped of all extraneous signage and either painted a different colour or veneered with a different material to stand apart from the rest of the interior, this would reaffirm the “specialness” of the area behind the doors. This visual signal would deter visitors from being overly aggressive about breaching this entrance way without permission.

Some healthcare spaces are an unfortunate labyrinth of hallways and exits with way-finding systems designed for appearance rather than real guidance. Imagine a complicated space so well-designed, with visual nudges in the form of colour, shape and texture (not text based signs) that invisibly encourages the most appropriate behaviour of its inhabitants.