When we first formed Kin, back in April 2008, we were invited to pitch on a new identity project for The NHS Portsmouth Hospitals Trust, with our friends and business consultant partners,
SHM Productions. SHM have a long history of working with the NHS, among other projects developing its nationwide Values Development Resource paper. We combined our resources together – SHM with their skill base in research, workshop co-ordination and insight and our strengths in strategy, identity design and production.
The identity project was to co-inside with the opening of a new state-of-the-art Hospital facility at Queen Alexandra Hospital. This was to be the new home for existing staff and patients and also to accommodate patients and staff from The Royal Haslar Hospital, recently closed, and St Mary’s Hospital, which planned to be reduced in size.
The NHS is an institution much loved by many, with many whom although criticise its running, are also very critical of change. Our main challenge was never one of design, but always one of public acceptance and public cost. We knew that this had to be a project where we collaborated closely with staff and patient groups as well as GPs and the local general public to find out what was good and what needed changing at PHT. We also knew that we needed to justify the cost – one that desperately needed addressing – but with recent cut-backs in mind, one that could be seen as unnecessary.
We pitched against 38 different companies and over the following 6 months were whittled down to 2. We focused on cost and built an approach in opposition to the common notion that an identity system is a superficial extra in public organisations. This was centered around the argument that by creating a great environment to work in you generate a sense of pride and team spirit, staff sickness and absence levels fall, massive cost savings are made, and the benefits to patients increased.
This was summaried by identity as more than a logo; as a synthesis of the story about what an organisation represents and what it stands for. An identity for a Hospital is a promise that it makes to its patients and to its staff. Clarity of the identity will help inform the way we the hospital works, the words it uses, and the experiences it creates.
As the NHS continues to evolve, its focus is to increasingly provide more choices to patients and their families about where they go for their healthcare and wellbeing needs. A modern hospital’s role is to work hard to become the provider of choice for patients and healthcare partners alike. Being the provider of choice requires excellence in everything it does. This of course means clinical excellence, but it also means excellence in the way it communicates, excellence in the way it recruits and develops its staff, and excellence in the overall customer experience it provides.
We were awarded the job in September last year and set to work the first phase of our schedule. The first task was to interview, gather, and collect as much information about the Hospital Trust and its staff as possible. SHM structured workshops with a core team of staff, patients, GPs and volunteers who then became our touch-stone throughout the project –evolving the ideas together and commenting on what they though worked and what didn’t. It was evident from the workshops that there was great sense of pride in the Hospital, many of its staff working there all their lives, proud of their achievements, often times under great resource pressure. The new hospital was planned to be equipped with some of the country’s best facilities, including Europe’s fastest blood testing centre, many of which the local public were unaware of.
We then started work on the design process, and taking the results of the research phase we created three ‘territories’ for exploration. These were based around main themes of Tradition/Respect, Technology/Innovation, Humanity/Care. We then slowly funneled this down to one direction, taking on board influence from the naval history of Portsmouth and the architecture of the new hospital building. We developed a flexible and expressive a design style inline with the NHS guidelines, creating a family of graphic shapes and forms, evolved from the buildings architecture and military symbols; namely flags and medals, that could be moved and cropped in different ways for different needs and applications. We developed executions for wide variety of print media (leaflets, posters, internal magazines etc), digital media (web, mobile), uniforms and environmental graphics. We developed a custom piece of software, which generates new previously unseen versions of the graphic forms and exports them as vector paths to be used in any media.
As the final deliverable for the end of the first phase, we wanted to create a piece of communication that explained why we were creating a new identity, the process that we had gone through and also a ‘base’ level identity guidelines. We also wanted it to be practical as a tool and inspirational as a piece of communication media. With this in mind we designed a Vision Identity Book, which worked both as an A4 book and a fold out A1 poster. On one side the poster brings together the results of the workshops, research and insight, with the other side focusing on more practical information of the identity and its applications. This way it can be used as a poster inside the hospital and also as a practical guidelines document for the internal design team.
The system is now slowly being rolled out throughout the Hospital, and we look forward to seeing the results from the internal design team at Portsmouth.
If you'd like more information about this or any other kin project, email us at:
questions@kin-design.com
