Contract Magazine - November 2019 - 37

PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY ICRAVE

One way hospitality has outpaced other sectors in innovation is through a
re-examination of the discomfort and missed opportunities associated with
waiting rooms. In a hotel or airport environment, 'waiting' doesn't have to
be a dirty word, so long as value is delivered to the customer during that time.
"Whether a traveler is required to wait-or they simply choose to because
anxiety keeps them from straying too far from, say, the gate or reservationist-
the tendency to stay put is a stretch of time that hospitality companies are
now optimizing for the customer," says David Taglione, Director at ICRAVE.
"So, when we began to innovate hospitals by applying the fundamentals
of hospitality, the natural starting point was the waiting room."
The waiting space of any healthcare environment is fraught
with challenges. From the fear associated with awaiting medical results,
to the anxiety of not knowing what will happen next, this experience is
a consistently a negative one. According to Taglione, transforming this
experience has been through-line in all the healthcare work ICRAVE has
done. "Our approach is to take these moments that have a net negative
effect on your perception of the brand, and challenge why they can't be
an opportunity to speak to your customer in a new way," he says, pointing
out that fundamental change requires courage and spatial cues that retrain
guests on how to use the space. Design can be a tool for messaging new

use types, and communicating them to a guest. "A thoughtful suggestion
on a tabletop, or a simple place to put your bag down are communication
tools," he says. "In hospitality, some of these things have become second
nature, but bringing them into healthcare requires an empathetic
approach to understand each specific stakeholder journey."
ICRAVE has been exploring this in their work with Memorial Sloan
Kettering at The Josie Robertson Surgery Center and The Koch Center in
New York City, opening this year. Their approach drives a new "Not Waiting"
model that delivers on empathetic solutions geared toward specific user
groups. Their spaces aim to understand the guest-whether a patient,
caregiver, or staff member-and craft an experience that unpacks over time
in a multiplicity of unique moments. "We aim to give control back to
patients and caregivers, ranging from microenvironments to diversity
in floor typologies that are each positioned uniquely along the spectrum
of sound, lights, porosity and engagement level," says Taglione. "We believe
if we can start to solve for their needs, build opportunities for choice, and
give back control, we can strive to build in the moment of inspiration. It's
important for us that we challenge the passive status that the waiting room
has had, in our experience, and ask if it can instead become an active
participant in our care."
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Contract Magazine - November 2019

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