The following booklets are a collaborative project from the Hospital Senses Collective, core collaborators on the Wellcome Trust grant ‘Senses and Modern Health/Care Environments’ (2019-22). At the core of this collaboration is not a shared research project, but a conversation about interdisciplinarity and new ways of doing research. We have developed a series of booklets, with short co-authored provocations, creative commissions and a playful physical form that help us to explore the senses in ways not possible in traditional publication forms.
Our approach to this collection of booklets draws on a range of disciplines and expertise, which moves through the different spaces of the hospital to illuminate the multisensory experience. The hospital spaces which we have identified as Waiting Spaces, Thresholds, Wards, Operating Theatres, The Laundry and Corridors, do not offer a singular set of sensory experiences. Everyone’s experience of each space will vary depending on geography, time, emotions and bodies. Rather than emphasise the importance or pervasiveness of one sense more than another we engage with different ways in which we might experience a different space.
The material qualities of the booklets, their design and form have been carefully considered to promote specific interactions and engagement. Each booklet embodies themes concerning hospital senses allowing us to move beyond the visual to explore the spatial, temporal, and sensorial through design and form. For example, readers meander down the ‘Routes In’ of Corridors, they reveal missing text through the turning of tracing paper, their gaze is directed through viewfinders, they unfurl maps and are invited to contribute their own hospital smellscapes. These processes and interactions involve spending time with and in each booklet, allowing us to explore and challenge understandings around the hospital environment.
Woven throughout each booklet are creative commissions. Our aim has been to offer a collection of creative and academic responses to the sensory and spatial experiences of the hospital. The voices, skills, and insights from artists, musicians, hospital staff, clinicians, designers, poets, come together to offer some multisensory, multi-spatial insight into the hospital experiences. The commissions create moments of reflection, exploring hospital senses through a rich array of lenses and approaches. Within academia, creative research methods are cited as facilitating a process of defamiliarisation whereby through creative engagement we may rethink and reconsider the familiar. We have similarly adopted this process of defamiliarisation through the ways in which creative commissions and academic contributions sit alongside one another inviting us to rethink and reimagine past, present and future hospital environments through the senses.
The individual sections of each booklet are formed around a prompt or provocation: a literary quote; a photograph; an object; a feeling. These prompts include historical details, illuminating how parts of hospital were in the nineteenth century, or in the 1940s with the birth of the NHS, as well as insight into how certain spaces have evolved and developed. They also include contemporary details of hospital spaces, such as art installations, co-designed spaces, and textiles. We explore the hospital from different perspectives. How does the waiting space sound to the woman awaiting news of her husband’s procedure? What does the infamous hospital food taste like? How does it feel to walk the hospital corridors all day, transporting patients and resources? What does the bed linen smell of? What does it mean to cross from the hospital foyer into the garden, or car park, or smoking area? What does the hospital corridor ceiling look like for the prone patient moving wards? We do not see this list as exhaustive of how the hospital might be experienced, but instead offer examples and snapshots which will provoke readers to reflect upon their own experiences of that space.
As the form of these booklets is so important to the experience of engagement, it seems counter-intuitive to put them online. We want, though, to make them accessible and have therefore sought to do so while honouring the booklets’ materiality. As you click through the links below, you will find photographs of our hand-sewn booklets (not PDFs!) alongside the text, and creative audio description. We hope that this will provide some online ‘routes in’ to our sensory booklets that complement and enhance their physical forms.
We recommend that you also listen to our creative audio description to accompany the booklets. The full playlist, including introduction, is below and is also available on each booklet page:
Please note that due to their focus on hospital senses, these booklets deal with some difficult themes, and in places include detailed descriptions of illness and medical treatment.
Please see the final page of each booklet’s photographs for full credits and copyright information, or contact us if you need this information in an accessible format. Any reuse of this material must adhere to our licence and be fully credited. Additional credits for website: Booklet photography by Jamie Carstairs. Creative Description and Narration by Lonny Evans. Sound effects from BBC sound archive. Incidental music and production by Alex Barron. Recordings are shared on a CC BY NC basis.
The Hospital Senses Collective is:
- Marie Allitt, researcher in literary medical humanities
- Agnes Arnold-Forster, historian of healthcare and the emotions
- Victoria Bates, historian of medicine and the senses
- Harriet Barratt, researcher in health humanities and psychoanalysis
- Emma Cheatle, researcher in architectural and health humanities
- Rebecka Fleetwood-Smith, researcher in arts, design and health
- Clare Hickman, historian of medicine and the environment
Sensing Spaces of Healthcare 