Canvases of Care
GE HealthCare
“Really powerful.”
– CBS News
Nurses' sacrifices too often go unseen. We often forget that it extends well beyond a patient's bedside. GE HealthCare's mission is to 'create a world where healthcare has no limits' so for International Nurses Week we unveiled moving tributes that show exactly-down to the hour- how much nurses care, reminding the world and themselves of their endless dedication.
We developed a special canvas where art and data could work together where each brushstroke represented one hour of care in a nurse's career. Extensive interviews and research helped calculate the total hours of care they've given-from every IV inserted to every moment of comfort -and used those precise hours as guardrails for portrait artist Tim Okamura, to paint. Once the brushstroke quota was reached the portraits were still incomplete, sending a bigger message, 'that a nurse's job is never done?
Creative direction
To ensure each tribute stayed true to the calculated hours of care, we constructed a custom 4K Multi Touch infrared canvas that detected objects as small as 1.5mm which meant Tim's creative process was not interrupted.
Custom software was also developed to track the duration, direction, and length of Tim’s brushstroke to account for both long and meandering brushstrokes as well as sharp points like staccato.
A digital counter was positioned next to Tim in order to keep each portrait true to their hours of care.
