The Dimensions of Touch
Advised by: Sierra Bainbridge, MASS Design Group
Community Partners: Galveston Bay Foundation, Shriner’s Hospitals for Children
This project builds joy and respite across four terrace designs at Shriner’s Hospital in Galveston, Texas as a means to offer the burn unit a place to get lost, play, and explore the dimensions of touch.
How are the materials that we encounter sensed or felt internally, especially when one’s physical ability to touch, or be touched, is altered? The varied abilities and sensitivities that someone may have opens up new ways for designing for or spatializing touch.
I approached the Galveston Bay Foundation who work around the Houston area, about partnering on a project that addresses deepening their methods of engagement with folks around the bay. We identified a partnership that was on the edge of flourish. Shriner’s hospital for children, located 40 minutes south of the GBFs main property, is a world-renowned research institute specializing in pediatric burn research and recovery. Shriner’s had reached out to GBF a year or so ago and the partnership never got off the ground - so we are using this opportunity to build a long-lasting relationship between the pediatric burn unit and the GBF.
To kick off our engagement and learn more about the two partners, I hosted an hour-long visioning session on Miro where we set goals, learned a great deal about the process of healing, how they value the work they do, and discussed some priority needs for the patients and families.
These diagrams were used to walk through the reconstruction process which begins at the ICU. Note: The designs that emerged from this process were curated for the ‘reconstruction phase’ in order to meet the patients and families where they were at and offer a space of respite and joy.
I wanted to challenge and expand upon the breadth of how we understand these dimensions of touch that can be explored for people with altered sensitivities that often present both internaly and externally. The first step was to identify four different dimensions of touch that relate to four sites where the designs play out at the hospital. Then, to tie this sort of “ meta-concept” to something spatial and material, four different ecologies from around the bay were selected that inform the four designs.
The process of healing is not a linear one. The external and internal sensitivities that are altered not only by traumatic events, but our everyday existence should be honored in the process of design.
