The Waiting Room (working title)

We are partnering with Document Films and Pentagram on a documentary project that profiles a hospital in Oakland, California over the course of a year. Different from standard documentaries, this project is rooted in the idea that we are all in the waiting room of national health care reform and social media can cast a wide net to pull in stories from anyone impacted by it into the core of the project.

Harnessing social and interactive media, we are creating a site that links the physical waiting room in Oakland to a virtual version online.  Users will view the real stories and audio streams of people coming in and out of the waiting room and they’ll leave comments, chat streams and their own audio or videos of health, illness, hope, despair. Beyond the boundaries of the physical and virtual rooms, we’ll capture what people are twittering about relevant health topics and let those tweets emerge as an evolving pulse of how the nation is feeling at any given moment. All of this material will then feed into a flat screen in the actual waiting room as patients, doctors and administrators there confront their very real challenges and engage as they can in the larger tapestry of voices.

We are designing around profound questions of language and technological accessibility with the goal of creating multiple (and multi-lingual) ways to connect to each other through cyberspace, cell networks and real, on the ground, face to face interactions.  Our aim is to not only widen the voices at the core of this project, but to actually increase users’ access to information, health care, new media and the solutions that can only come out of creative and broad-based communication.

 

 

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