Three Neighbours, One Broken System: Emergency meets hospital navigation failure
Three Neighbours, One Broken System: Emergency meets hospital navigation failure
Ashwath Narayan Jonagadlu Ramesh Babu
Ashwath Narayan JR is currently pursuing an MSc in Diagnostics, Data and Digital Health at the University of Warwick. With a strong background in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, I always try to bring a deep curiosity and a creative approach to solving problems across every stage of digital innovation.
About the Project
Through three progressive phases of design thinking, this design portfolio explores the phenomenal relationship among environment, user emotion, and accessibility. Using Maya, the little girl who earlier identified with nature but whose nexus is now broken by urban life, Design Study One is invoked to show the emotional legacy of place. Then her tale shows how regularity, belongingness, and wellbeing can be made to exist in richer sensory surroundings. Design Study Two continues from where it was left off, adding the user's experience of spatial disorientation in high-risk environments such as hospitals. The account of three neighbours – Leela, a nurse; Ravi, a regular patient; and Ananya, a newcomer in an emergency department – dramatises the sad reality where hospitals fail their patients with confusing layouts, poor directions, and overwhelming environments. Although they are in the same place, persona profiling and empathy mapping reveal the different struggles each faces. Care Trails is an offline, multisensory navigation system, including raised paths and Braille maps for blind and all-people-accessible navigation, envisioned in Design Study Three. The whole system comes complete with tactile textures, animal themes and iconography, colour-coded floor routes, and accessible signs. This allows the hospital to be experienced in a reimagined form as a peaceful guided experience rather than as a labyrinth. This portfolio reveals how user-centred design, inclusive design thinking, and emotional intelligence could turn public spaces from very functional places to humane spaces by slowly transforming uncertainty and anxiety into confidence and clarity. One trail at a time, Care Trail's way.