Helping families negotiate the trip to and through medical care at Johns Hopkins is paramount in the patient-centered design of the new clinical buildings under construction on its East Baltimore campus. Like its adjoining Sheikh Zayed Tower for adults, the Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children’s Center building is designed to help visitors navigate the emotional waters of diagnosis and treatment and find comfort and calm in the process.
Wayfinding, says Director of Architecture and Planning Michael Iati, “starts at the beginning of families’ experience,” with the first communications from the hospital and continues on with thoughtful, well-placed street and garage signage as well as color-coding and nomenclature consistency throughout the hospital itself.
In a quarterly update, Dec. 16, for Johns Hopkins employees on the construction of the vast new buildings, Iati provided a roadmap of his own to help make navigation child’s play. He began by showing how the buildings’ two bridges, which extend at both ends to a parking garage across Orleans Street, will help define a large, new urban space and landmark in Baltimore, one that lets visitors know “you’ve arrived at something special and notable,” he said, “that you’ve arrived at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.”
Early in the design process, he and his colleagues considered the various ways that people find their way. Some rely on color and light, others on shapes and signage. So, in the new buildings, there’s something for everyone. The adult building has been assigned a predominately green theme, the children’s a blue. Color coding begins in the garage and extends across their respective bridges from the garage to the buildings, to the glass in their windows, colors in their elevators and floors and throughout patient units. Their absence, even, is a guide, indicating that families have moved into faculty and staff areas.
Additional color schemes help define the different patient floors, and extend into each floor’s family “lounge.” Gone is the name “waiting room.” Says Iati: “We don’t want to tell families to wait; we want them to go and relax.”
Light and architectural features like giant hanging mobiles of puffer fish, a cow and ostrich, among others in the building’s vast atrium, help create landmarks for families, cluing them into where they are. Different artwork in every elevator lobby of each of the new children's hospital's 12 floors provides more visual reminders. For visitors who rely on auditory clues, recordings in the elevators name every level in a way that most of them will hear: ‘This is Level 3,’ and so on. “When people are stressed,” says Iati, “they often don’t hear the first words of what is being said. So we added a few before the important ones, to help them out.”
Video monitors in the elevators, two for adults and two lower down for kids, provide more directional support, with details and graphics of the services on each floor.
Kiosks and perhaps little GPS devices like those now given to visitors on the Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus could find their way to the new clinical buildings.
Construction of the buildings is expected to be completed by late 2011 or early 2012.