Healthcare in Transition. Architectures and processes at the convergence of healthcare and technology
Ijdoorn Polder, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
The project commenced in probing: What kind of public health intervention (infrastructural and systemic) can contribute to innovation in the management of the Dutch healthcare system and alleviating its territorial footprint?
Through researching on information flows and the territorial footprint of information around the North Sea – in line with the Transitional Territories Studio scope of intervention, we observed that the global production of data is growing with the increasing digitisation of processes and flows resulting in an increase in architectures required to handle the physicality of this information . In taking an interest in population movement, surveillance and tracking, an intersection was found between the growing production and tracking of health data.
With its principal physical footprint illustrated as treatments centres (amongst other typologies), the growing production of health data enables the speculation on the physical requirements of the former. Therefore, the territorialisation of healthcare can be managed as redundancies and opportunities can be observed. However, future trends in healthcare are always fluctuating, calling for flexibility within projected future scenarios to cater to changes in population health and technology development.
In a parallel line of inquiry, along with the studio’s fascination with the relationship between land and sea in the context of the North Sea, a probe is set on the relationship between healthcare and the sea. In commencing with the antique fascination of the sea as a boundary, to is consumerisation in the 19th century, its threshold, the coast has become a territory for healing, according to studies . There is hereby an opportunity to combine processes of healing.
Thus, the project’s objectives which outline the equalisation of digital and natural infrastructure as means of treatment, increasing the efficiency of healing procedures and the consideration of the coast as a therapeutic landscape, are formatted into a proposal imagining alternative medical futures, via a multi-dimensional approach. This is set within an acute, modular and semi-automated treatment facility (medical village) nestled within a coastal territory for healing. Technocratic processes are therefore being applied to the organic function of healing.
With the evolved understanding of healthcare, its physical impacts and future potentials, the research re-asserts that the notion of cure and care has expanded into the idea of well-being and continuous care. Therefore, like a feedback loop, the reconfiguration of the architectural typologies needed in healthcare inherently redesign our approach to healthcare.