AUCKLAND, Last night: Parnell-based design tech studio Rush has been recognised at the Good Design Awards in Sydney for their work with Starship Children’s Hospital.
The interactive, kid-friendly experience Rush created to help calm children and their families at Starship was named winner of the Social Impact category, in recognition of outstanding design and innovation.
Rush CD Terry Williams-Willcock said: “With 34,000 children going through Starship’s emergency department each year, Rush was tasked by the hospital and its sponsor ASB with creating new and better ways to assess and admit patients, while helping to calm and prepare them for treatment.”
With help from their creative partners, Rush designed and developed two different experiences – the Starship Animal Check-ups and The Magic Forest.
“The Starship experiences are controlled by Rush proprietary sensors and an interactive computer vision-based tracking system.”
The Starship Animal Check-ups space features a wall of frames with different characters to take children through the check-up experiences and processes they’re about to undergo – such as lions teaching them to open their mouths wide.
The Magic Forest, is an avatar scene experience that creates a calming space for relaxing and enjoying quiet time, with beautifully rendered flowers and birds that react to children’s movements.
The Starship experiences are controlled by Rush proprietary sensors and an interactive computer vision-based tracking system and were designed following behaviour observations and discussions with play specialists and nurses.
“Our goal with the Starship experience was to create smiles for people going through a distressing situation,” Williams-Willcock says.
“Our design approach was to empathise, ideate and prototype experiences to ensure they had a major impact on our different audiences and we’re thrilled all this hard work has been given the nod.”
About Rush
Rush is a design and tech studio for the exponential age. The future is rushing towards us and technology is changing us faster than we realise. But at Rush, we’re cool with that. Because uncertainty creates opportunity, we get to be good humans, solve business and social problems and shape a better world.
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