Abstract
This pictorial presents Blurring Boundaries, a speculative exhibition and workshop series staged during Melbourne Design Week 2025, that explores the shifting landscape of Hospital in the Home (HITH) care. As healthcare moves from clinical to domestic settings, design plays a critical role in navigating the tensions, values, and lived experiences this transition provokes. Over five days, more than 80 designers, architects, clinicians, patient advocates, and students co-created artefacts that were progressively integrated into the gallery, transforming the space into a dynamic, participatory installation. Framed in three acts — Surfacing, Envisioning, and Together ing — the exhibition scaffolded collective futuring through critical making, mapping, and reflection. Drawing on theories of domestication, care, and the medical gaze, the project interrogates how technologies and practices shape the emotional, spatial, and ethical dimensions of home-based care. It contributes to emerging design-healthcare conversations by proposing the exhibition itself as a ‘theatre for conversation’ — hybrid method for co-producing plural, situated, and more humane imaginaries for the future of care at home.
Keywords
Exhibition-as-Research; Speculative Design; Hospital in the Home (HITH); Healthcare Futures
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.250
Citation
McGee, T., Melbourne, M.U., Killen, A., Melbourne, M.U., Page, R.,and Melbourne, M.U.(2025) Blurring Boundaries: A Speculative and Generative Exhibition exploring Hospital in the Home, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.250
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 9 - Healthcare Design
Blurring Boundaries: A Speculative and Generative Exhibition exploring Hospital in the Home
This pictorial presents Blurring Boundaries, a speculative exhibition and workshop series staged during Melbourne Design Week 2025, that explores the shifting landscape of Hospital in the Home (HITH) care. As healthcare moves from clinical to domestic settings, design plays a critical role in navigating the tensions, values, and lived experiences this transition provokes. Over five days, more than 80 designers, architects, clinicians, patient advocates, and students co-created artefacts that were progressively integrated into the gallery, transforming the space into a dynamic, participatory installation. Framed in three acts — Surfacing, Envisioning, and Together ing — the exhibition scaffolded collective futuring through critical making, mapping, and reflection. Drawing on theories of domestication, care, and the medical gaze, the project interrogates how technologies and practices shape the emotional, spatial, and ethical dimensions of home-based care. It contributes to emerging design-healthcare conversations by proposing the exhibition itself as a ‘theatre for conversation’ — hybrid method for co-producing plural, situated, and more humane imaginaries for the future of care at home.