CHAMBER OF
COMMONS

Rural Health care is one of the biggest challenges facing the Health Ministry of India. A contributing factor is economic disparity and the challenges that this brings for example, education, standard of living, literacy rate etc. With more than 70 percent population living in rural areas and low level of health facilities, mortality rates due to diseases are on a high.

“Chamber of Commons” is an attempt to raise awareness about the problems like lack of health education, lack of proper knowledge the general population in rural communities goes through in their every day life. The project aims to inculcate a culture of pro-active involvement of patients and members of their respective families using self-organizational tools, with particular focus on semi-urban and rural Indian hospitals. On one side by exploring the point of the views of the people who run the hospitals such as doctors, and staff members, the project aims to understand problems hospitals face. On the other side, unpacking and empathizing with different perspectives of the general population (patients and relatives) by taking into account their worries, their anxieties, and why they behave the way they behave in a hospital.

The result is building up confidence of patients and the members of the families through a series of design interventions that are influenced by local knowledge, cultural dynamics. In order to understand this local knowledge and cultural dynamic, a design ethnographic research was undertaken.