ACTIVITIES AND CONNECTIONS
A “doctor’s-gym” is a new type of neighborhood clinic that is meant to build closer relationships between communities and local healthcare providers. Being a hybrid of both a medical clinic and a gymnasium there was a lot of debate on how the two functions would work together. Activities and Connections is an architectural game which is meant to generate ideas on how a doctor’s-gym can feel like one place.
The site for this project is a parking lot in Ocean Beach, CA next to a famous fishing pier. This site was selected for its heavy foot traffic and its adjacency to the beach. People have naturally gathered at this site to improve their health ever since the founding of the community. This site is highly visible and it is intended to give the doctor’s-gym high visibility. A gameboard was constructed of the site.
It was determined that for a doctor's gym to be successful, it would need three basic elements: a convenient location, healthy architectural design, and a feeling like it was one place. A lot of doctor’s offices are architecturally separated from the community. Often, they are in large “professional” looking buildings that do not encourage visitors unless they have a specific appointment. Gymnasiums are usually close to where people live work and play so they can be visited often. Gyms also are a play where people practice preventive medicine.
While people visit clinics for the specific purpose of treating a disease or injury, they are ironically unhealthy places to inhabit. Workers and patients may be lucky to have access to windows and often must wait/work under florescent lights. According to the National Institutes of Health, Americans spend almost 90% of their lives in buildings. Building interiors obviously must have an impact on the health of its inhabitants. If a medical facility is designed with healthy design elements it can passively heal its workers and patrons.
Finally, a doctors-gym must have a mixture between fitness and medicine so it can feel like one place. There are some obvious ways medicine and fitness can mix such as occupational and physical therapy but it is suspected that there are more ways the two can flow together. Several iterations of Activities and Connections should help generate ideas.
It took several iterations to design the pieces and rework the rules so that the game would flow. The rules were reduced to 3 simple steps and 16 rolls of the dice to quickly get results and attract participants.
STEP 2: Select a Healthy Architectural Strategy
After players place their pieces on the board they connect to others with a bold colorful string.
Fitness activities can connect to fitness activities.
Medical activities can connect to medical activities.
Medical and fitness activities can only be joined through shared or special activities/spaces.
