Watch a film about the Bedside Cabinet on Vimeo.
Ian Thompson
Senior Designer, Kinneir Dufort
I’m Ian Thompson; I’m a senior designer, here, at Kinneir Dufort.
Craig Wightman
Design Director, Kinneir Dufort
And I’m Craig Wightman, I’m design director here, and the brief that we’re working on is the bedside cabinet.
Reducing areas which can harbour infection
We believe that we’ve produced a design that will improve infection control through a number of features that we’ve built into the new cabinet. One is that it’s made up of very few parts, there’s only a body and two drawers, so we’ve reduced the number of joints and crevices that can harbour infection. We’ve made very clear touch points for where users and staff will connect with the cabinet, so the handles have been designed in a particular way, to be very easy to clean. We have drawers that you can pull out to make cleaning easier, and once they are pulled out, the cabinet itself has no back, so we reduced the number of surfaces that require to be cleaned. All these aspects that we know from speaking to infection control staff will have an impact on improved infection control in wards.
Stuart Davis
Managing Director, Bristol Maid Hospital Metalcraft
Manufacture serving design
The main challenge that we faced related to our use of traditional manufacturing techniques over the past 55 years. We quickly realised, working with Kinneir Dufort, that the design was paramount and whatever the manufacturing process was going to be was up to them.
Ian Thompson
The choice of materials
The material that we’ve chosen for the bedside cabinet is high density polyethylene, this is a material that can be used in the rotational moulding process of manufacture, and this gives us a product that is one surface, and it’s easy to clean, and there’s no seams, or junctions, or joints that infections can linger within, and the material has a good surface finish that is smooth and flat.
From our research there were a number of comments and photographs that fed into the design stage, and we also used the existing furniture, I did lots of role play around them.
Craig Wightman
Prototyping and user feedback
And having established our very strong lead concept, there was still quite a lot of iterative work to do, and the way we did that was really to turn the concept, which is in visual form, which gives users an opportunity to feed back on these visuals, something more tangible in the form of a rough prototype, or two rough prototypes we ended up making, and they helped, really, to work through some of the fine tuning issues to do with size, to do with functionality of the drawers, to do with heights of the surfaces, that we took those prototypes into hospital environments, got feedback from staff, generated a lot of interest, we got a lot of very constructive response that helped to fine tune our final product.
Hopes for the design
Our hopes for the design were that it would make a real difference in hospitals in the UK and beyond, and we were always very keen to create a real world solution, which, I think, we’re very close to achieving.
Stuart Davis
Initial feedback has been extremely encouraging. It’s our intention to go to market with this product in the foreseeable future.
Ian Thompson
I think it’s an incredibly important piece of furniture design, I think it’s the type of design work that can possibly save lives in the future, and I think this is the type of work that designers should be involved with, and I just want to see this product make a difference in hospitals.