Designer: Herman Miller Healthcare & Continuum Design Team Location: West Newton, MA, USA Category: Interiors / Exhibitions Award: Notable

Herman Miller Compass System

Compass is a modular system of interchangeable components used to create applications for patient rooms, caregiver work areas and other clinical spaces. Compass improves caregiver efficiency, supports new and changing technologies, improves the patient and family experience and offers surfaces and construction that have been optimized for the healthcare environment.

The goal for hospitals is obvious—to help people get better. However, hospitals employ many stakeholders, and the goals of these stakeholders on a moment-by-moment basis are not always aligned. This can create an unsettling environment for the patient and impede the patient's road to recovery. Our research focused on the patient and how to heal them, but we also focused on understanding the needs of physicians, nurses, custodial staff, patients' families, hospital administrators and architects so that we could design a system that would help them all achieve their shared goal - better patient care. By understanding the needs of all the stakeholders in the hospital care ecosystem, we were able to understand how their relationships can conflict with each other and how we could design a system to overcome these conflicts.

Core77: What's the latest news or development with your project?

Compass continues to be a huge success and Continuum and Herman Miller are planning to continuously add new capabilities, applications and features. The First installation of Compass is complete in Virginia Mason Hospital.

What is one quick anecdote about your project?

The Eureka moment in the development of Compass was the realization that no matter how hard we tried we could not design the ideal patient room! We needed to design for constant change. The fact is that there are new hospitals being built and old hospitals being renovated constantly. That the day a hospital opens it needs to change. This is because of changing technologies, changing demographics, and changing approaches to delivering health care.

Read on for full details on the project and jury comments.