DRAFTS
Through the lens of Art as Therapy & the 5 Ways to Wellbeing, art has helped us to notice, learn, connect, be active and give.
This site has been a place to help me notice & make progress each year.
Now we want to go further…
For years, many General Practices have had to focus on survival, as noted in this article from 2017 in The Guardian and the King’s Fund position statement.
NHS care is supposed to be based on health need, and yet in areas of deprivation, for years, the funding has cover even less of the workload. Leading to recruitment & retention probelms, affecting patient outcomes.
Despite these pressures, the nearby practice closures and the pandemic, we still believe in the value of General Practice and want to make it even better. Woodingdean Medical Centre continues to innovate and make progress, but it is not easy.
For our patients and teams, we want to help Woodingdean Medical Centre and Brighton&Hove general practice, Networks and the NHS not only survive, but flourish despite NHS funding issues.
This takes more innovation & funding…
Can we build projects that can promote health, raise funds and provide more & sustainable services for patients with a more manageable workload for staff and improved NHS care?
By finding ways for a worldwide audience to be able to contribute funds while also benefiting from the projects.
OpenArtSurgery Ltd (OAS - a not-for-profit company) is creating projects & art installations
that combine health promotion & fund-raising.
These early versions are demonstrators of concepts to lead to collaborations & pilots, to study their benefits and impact.
We want Woodingdean Medical Centre (WMC) to become the first General practice in England, to use Serious Games (Wikipedia) & Art, for health promotion and fund-raising, to enable the provision of more services & equipment for patients, with a more manageable workload for staff and improved care.
Then expand to our Primary Care Network and beyond.
We are at the very early stages of testing.
The OpenArtSurgery opened its ONLINE Health Promotion GALLERY in May 2022 to bring together & exhibit serious games & art installations.
There you can visit a virtual WMC, with installations showing the works under development that need your feedback and support.
Test, review & donate to the simple health promotion games
Review - art installation ideas - see 10 Billion Squames as an example of future works.
Donate to take part & encourage us
We are working on a shoe-string of funds & time (as no NHS funds or time are being used), so these early versions (linked below) are only demonstrators of concepts to start the ball rolling to generate interest & funding.
We were part of the Brighton & Hove Artists Open House (AOH) - online - where Woodingdean Medical Centre becomes the OpenArtSurgery gallery the the theme of “Preventing Heart Disease and Strokes”, share the early ideas, get your feedback to steer us and start to crowdfund the ideas that you want us to progress.
See AOH Brochure page - ONLINE ONLY gallery
You can support the ideas through donations
You can shape the ideas through feedback and contributions.
10 Billion Squames - 2022-23
This is our most ambitious project in the pipeline - needing more planning, collaboration and funding.
A collaborative project to connect the whole planet through our skin, to form a vast, mesmerising, patchwork quilt.
The work explores the dual nature of our simultaneous:
sameness & difference and individuality & universality.
It will also provide skin health promotion, aimed at reducing the occurrence and impact of skin cancers.
As contributors, we upload an image of our skin. Contributions are digitised & fired across the sky to become blocks/tiles of blue fabric that join together as part of the patchwork of the quilt of a worldwide community.
Each block also creates a mindful place for each contributor.
Imagine everyone in the world has a chance to have a representation of their skin (as a tone of blue) randomly allocated to a space in the quilt - free to join.
To crowdfund this idea we have to mock up a very, very basic version, where contributors can select a tile, donate and choose to have their donation listed as a show of support.
When we launch and as the artwork forms, there will be NFT artwork opportunities - contributors will be in a draw to receive some of the first NFTs artworks.
Very basic demo of the framework being developed
Make a donation to the OpenArtSurgery Ltd
It all begins with an idea.
This is only a framework, the artwork will evolve with time.
As contributors, we upload an image of our skin. Contributions are digitised & fired across the sky to become blocks/tiles of blue fabric that join together as part of the patchwork of the quilt of a worldwide community.
Each block also creates a mindful place for each contributor.
Imagine everyone in the world has a chance to have a representation of their skin (as a tone of blue) randomly allocated to a space in the quilt - free to join.
-
We’re a Not-for-profit company.
Aiming for:
70% to patient services
30% to R&D and costs (health promotion games & related art development)
(Fundraising and running a non-profit company incurs some costs & fees - the above figures are after transaction fees, HMRC and taxes - which we aim to keep to a minimum)
Donate to make this happen
We are going to crowdfund this idea
I would like to work with the British Skin Foundation & the Primary Care Dermatology Service.
Inspiration from computational thinking & learning to code from Unity Learn, Sebastian Lague, Noa Calice and others…
Learning with the kids (BBC-Bitesize) about computational thinking (description & criticisms - Wikipedia) , while learning to code. While it has it’s criticisms, I have found computational thinking a useful tool for many processes beyond programming.
Something playful & inspiring while organising GTOAS and SKiNET.
Learning below includes Unity learning pages, Sebastian Lague & Noa Calice (aka BlackthornProd).
Sebastian Lague
Lots of inspiration.
Respect where it’s due.
I found the Boids video after “reading” Complexity by Mitchel Waldrop.
Other courses
Learning some C# & Unity using this course from Noa Calice (aka Blackthornprod).
This video was also interesting.
I have no affiliation.
——-
The Art of the SERIOUS GAME - 2021-22
Based at the OpenArtSurgery - NFP
Playing with the use of Serious Games (Wikipedia) & Art, for health promotion and fund-raising, to enable the provision of more services & equipment for patients, forming virtuous cycles.
See our Games page.
Research into “Serious games” is growing.
“A serious game is an “educational application, whose initial intention is to combine, coherently and at the same time, serious aspects, in a non-exhaustive and non-exclusive way, teaching, learning, communication, or even information with the fun aspects of video games” [ALV 07].” from Connected Healthcare for the Citizen, 2018
We are building some basic ones now to demonstrate the ideas.
This first project will particularly focus on Hypertension & related lifestyle interventions during gameplay.
We need to raise some funds to develop the ideas and study their effectiveness.