“Co-designed personalised reusable theatre caps: Enhancing sustainability, communication, identification and comfort”

Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. The challenges we face, however, present an incredible opportunity to do things differently – to adopt innovative, design-led approaches that will transform NHS Scotland’s health and social care ecosystem. This paper presents research that unites a wide range of disciplines, research organisations, regional and local industry, and other public sector stakeholders. Design HOPES, one of four Green Transition Ecosystem (GTE) Hubs funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), embeds in designing, making and acting through circularity principles, to drive sustainability and change across products and services, strategy, policy and social influence to evolve design outcomes that will matter most to people and planet.

Design HOPES encompasses a rich disciplinary mix of knowledge, skills and expertise from a range of design disciplines (i.e. product, textile, interaction, games, architecture, etc.) and other disciplines (computer science, health and wellbeing, geography, engineering, etc.) that is focused on people and planet, from the micro to macro, from root cause to hopeful vision, from the present to future, and from the personal to massive populations. Design HOPES’ work involves designing and making things and testing them to see how they work driving further iteration of ideas and resolutions.

This paper describes one specific Design HOPES project that aims to eliminate the dependency on single-use, disposable theatre caps while addressing communication barriers and misidentification issues among NHS Scotland staff. Working closely with NHS Golden Jubilee theatre staff, the authors have co-designed a diverse range of options for reducing theatre cap waste (hundreds of thousands of single-use theatre caps are disposed of every year across NHS Scotland hospitals). The co-designed reusable theatre caps propose and test new material considerations, driving far greener practices while delivering better fitting, more comfortable garments.

The paper highlights that there is much that can be done to improve textile and other material products across NHS Scotland. Furthermore, the paper shares one of many creative approaches Design HOPES is taking to transform a range of NHS Scotland products and services. The co-designed personalised reusable theatre caps paper outlines a series of co-design workshops in NHS Scotland settings that empower people to define problems and to actively inform solutions by hacking, making and testing possibilities. The paper presents also presents a holistic approach to the design and development of an innovative piece of theatre staff uniform with significant environmental credentials.