How could any clinical environment compete against the alluring Caribbean beauty of the Cayman Islands? For sure, anyone venturing indoors for a medical appointment, can’t wait to head back out to the tropical breeze and azure horizon line.
But what if the atmosphere felt so welcoming and reassuring no matter what scan or exam you were scheduled to undergo, both patients and staff felt at ease?
In 2019, when OceanMed Clinic, a women’s healthcare facility, first opened its doors, the environment of care was of paramount importance. The clinic’s mission was to provide the best quality care for women in a beautiful, calm, SPA-like facility that communicated to patients that they were in good hands.
The clinic designed every room, no matter how small, to feel spacious. The clinic packed a lot of specialized equipment into each area and every one of the spaces was designed to elicit a palpable feeling of openness as visitors waded in and out for assorted evaluations.
And while most organizations, even in a location as alluring as the Cayman Islands, cannot always pick a location that affords spectacular views to nature, it is still possible to glean the therapeutic benefits of an attractive natural vistas. Biophilic illusions of nature, simulated windows with over a decade of peer-reviewed research documenting their positive outcomes, usher a significant measure of these restorative benefits.
Following this approach, OceanMed Clinic managed to make tight clinical spaces feel comfortable. In its thirteen room layout, it offers dedicated space for an obstetrics and gynecology (OB/GYN) exam room, including three ultrasound settings, a room dedicated to mammography, another assigned as the radiologist’s biopsy room, and a nurse room.
In the OB/GYN room, the largest wall features a set of three Luminous Virtual Windows, each window measuring 2’ x 4’ (60cm x 120cm) depicting a warm sandy beach at sunrise. The realistic scale and placement of the photography’s point-of-view is framed by a trio of wall-recessed window openings that stimulate our memories of experienced beachfront vistas.
The vibrant, but gentle daylight-quality LED illumination that the backlit scene generates contributes to underscores the genuine feeling of depth communicated by the perceived horizon line. Calibrated light, assorted elements of visual composition, and natural materials on the window frames coalesce to seduce our hardwired habits of perception and persuasively link the interior with a much larger natural exterior.
On the other hand, in the radiologist’s biopsy room, we see the powerful therapeutic effect of uniting both illusory window views with an overhead sky illusion. For starters, the wall features a set of three Luminous Virtual Windows, each window measuring 2’ x 4’ (60cm x 120cm) with a beautiful tropical view. The lush view is paired with an overhead vista in the ceiling above the patient bed (not pictured) featuring two 3’ x 6’ (90cm x 180cm) Revelation SkyCeilings.
The perceived zenith generated by the daylight quality LED illumination powering the photographic Open Sky CompositionTM by Sky Factory draws the eye beyond the ceiling plane. This credible illusion of vertical volume generates spatial polarity (a dramatic change of scale that elicit the documented benefits of views offering both prospect and refuge), thereby triggering an autonomic relaxation response.
Overall the clinic installed 11 architectural illusions across its building, including 9 landscape views and 5 overhead portals. OceanMed included three Digital Cinema installations, including a full motion virtual skylight called SkyView that displays gravitationally-correct (perpendicular to the ground) 4K footage of dynamic sky events.
SkyView is a self-contained commercial display system that contains 8+ hours of unedited, feature-length footage of the zenith, an engrossing overhead view of blooming branches rustled by the wind while white clouds occasionally drift underneath pristine, blue skies.
The other two Digital Cinema systems were installed in the Mammography Room, each one flanking the scanning equipment so enable patients to get a full view of the outdoor scene during their session. The full motion Digital Cinema virtual windows (eScape 2.0) are also unique in that their unedited, feature-length scenes come with sound, further enhancing the multisensory realism of the landscape vistas.
The eScape 2.0 landscape scenes are framed vertically, which also help enhance the illusion of depth they generate and divorce them completely from the traditional landscape orientation that televised monitors convey. And to enhance the clinic’s location as a former European territory, both Digital Cinema systems feature elegant French windows with a soft, white finish that matches all the Luminous Virtual Windows in the clinic.
Wellness design has filtered more and more into healthcare spaces, and the documented psycho-physiological benefits of biophilic design has convinced leading health providers that environments that feature these restorative 14 patterns make for outstanding clinical spaces.
Biophilia, our innate affinity with other living organisms, is a characteristic that architects and interior designers must account for in the development of therapeutic spaces. And the visual arts are a powerful therapeutic tool in the environment of care because they establish a direct link between our memories and imagination. And the phenomenology of art perception leads to the neurobiology of healing.
