Feel Chair

The Feel Chair is the outcome of a research-design project that aimed to improve the experiences of intravenous chemotherapy patients at Auckland City Hospital’s Cancer and Blood Service. 

Chemotherapy is a systemic type of cancer treatment which can treat cancer cells almost anywhere in the body by using the patient’s bloodstream. Chemotherapy is a regimen of drugs tailored to treat each patients whole body to helps fight the growth and spread of cancer. These drugs are unable to differentiate between a normal and mutated cell and cause the various side effects we all know of when we think of the word ‘cancer’ or ‘chemo’.

Intravenous chemotherapy treatment can typically last anywhere from 15 minutes to over 8 hours. Chemotherapy is form of cancer treatment however, it has various side effects which can affect people in different ways. Because of this, the emotional experience of chemotherapy patients can differ between every patient depending on their situation.

Through the immersive research design practice and emotional journey taken, a clear understanding of the aesthetic and emotional landscape was achieved, ultimately exposing problem areas within the areas of performance, engineering, and aesthetics of the oncology ecosystem.

The Feel Chair introduces an emotionally resonant aesthetic experience the complex and highly medicalised chemotherapy environment. This projects very nature challenges the prevailing paradigm within medicine on cost efficiency for medical outcomes. The design embodies the true needs of the chemotherapy patients. It rethinks how a chemotherapy chair performs, is engineered and is aesthetically experienced. The form and aesthetic introduces a surface of support that caters for different levels and positions of vulnerability. The chair is motorized which inclines and declines the back rest and leg rest independently. This chair was designed to use easily available parts to minimize breakdowns and wait-times for new parts. As the chair declines into a resting position, the side ‘wings’ envelope the user to provide a sense of safety and peripheral support.