Healthcare – Medicine Wheel

After lighting upon the medicine wheel I realized I had found my vessel for the final proposal. My mind immediately came up with a form for it. I thought of a large circle perpendicular to the ground that people could walk through. It would be covered with acrylic tiles showing peoples stories in health care. The acrylic was hard to see so I wanted something underneath of it. The visuals I had experimented with before were nice, but not logistically possible. I thought back to how I felt about going to see the doctor: that the industry thinks of me as blood work data, as statistics, as a bottom line really. How could I interweave this into the project? Maybe I could put the acrylic overtop of healthcare data, global, and personal?

I thought it would be great to have the data there as the base, since that’s the industry, that’s the story that the world tells. But healthcare is not about these numbers, its ultimately about us living and dying, getting sick and healing. These stories should lay overtop of that base. People could walk through the circle, and lights from within it would shine through the various layers, light being such a multi-faceted symbol: feeling lighter or heavier, shining light on a subject, healing light, etc.

I tried it out on top of my bloodwork report…. and unfortunately you can barely see the acrylic images at all:

My mind searched more, but I really liked this idea. I thought about trying out etching the images on black acrylic, and then perhaps trying the words on opaque acrylic. In this video I’ve taken an etching in black and put it on top of laser cut text from my blood work report. I then shine light through it.

I knew I had it. My proposal would be a large circle people could walk through and trigger light to shine through multiple layers of acrylic, telling multiple stories, called the Medicine Wheel. Part of the circle would be uncovered and unfinished, to signify that we can and are still writing this story. Our health, our societies, our places in the universe are in constant flux… perhaps the Medicine Wheel can once again help guide their direction.