Royal Bolton NHS - Children's Ward

Brief: To make the children's ward a more comfortable place for children aged between 0-16. What we did: In brainstorming and researching what children enjoy and what calms them, we found that familiar things, and things that can bring back positive memories can be quite calming. We were given a brief by the Royal Bolton Hospital, this brief was essentially to make their children's ward more comfortable and inviting for the children, giving them more to engage with. Working in pairs we tackled the brief head on. My partner and I decided to do this via illustration, using a beach theme. Upon visiting the hospital we realised that the lower sections of the walls were completely bare everywhere, with all of the focal points being higher up. This left the younger children with nothing to really see or interact with as there was nothing within their eye line. It was from here that we came up with the idea of creating a full scale mural for the wall, in which different children would see and interact with different parts based upon their eye line. We created hundreds of characters and elements for this. Alongside the mural we created three videos, using the same visual and varying audio (based off of three target groups, 0-4, 5-10 and 11-16) to introduce the children to the hospital. We used various characters to reflect the staff. Supporting things such as badges for the staff (relating to their character) were also created.