Six Years of Clinical Field Research

Most designers research users. Fewer research users in environments where the stakes are high enough that the research itself requires careful ethical navigation. Over six years at Chromaviso, I spent significant time inside clinical settings across the spectrum of Nordic healthcare.

This isn’t a single project — it’s the research practice that ran underneath all of the others.

Where I worked

Operating theatres — participating in surgical operations to understand lighting requirements at the extreme end of precision work. Surgical lighting is a life-safety domain. The requirements are unforgiving: shadow elimination, colour rendering for tissue differentiation, glare management for long procedures. Observing operations made concrete what abstract lighting specifications never could.

Intensive care units — where patients are sedated, time perception is lost, and light is a genuine therapeutic tool. ICU lighting affects patient recovery, staff fatigue, and family experience simultaneously. Understanding how nurses use lighting during a shift — the rhythm of observations, interventions, and quiet periods — shaped both the interface design and the scene models.

Psychiatric departments — where the relationship between light and patient state is particularly sensitive. Agitation, sleep disruption, and mood are all lighting-responsive in ways that demand careful, non-disruptive interface design. This context produced the strongest requirements around ambient legibility and minimal interface friction.

Nursing care homes — where users are older, shifts are long, and tech familiarity varies widely. The design challenge here is different from acute care: consistency and simplicity matter more than flexibility, and interfaces that work for a newly hired care assistant at 3am matter more than ones optimised for a power user.

Somatic hospital wards — the broadest context, where most of the product’s day-to-day usage happens. Observing nursing workflows across morning, afternoon, and night shifts built an understanding of lighting control as one small part of a very full cognitive day.

What this kind of research produces

Clinical field research produces a kind of domain knowledge that is qualitatively different from what comes out of interviews, surveys, or usability labs. You don’t just learn what users say they need — you learn what they actually do, under real conditions, when nobody’s watching and the shift is difficult.

Specific things I wouldn’t have learned any other way:

• The lighting states that correlate with handover moments, medication rounds, and emergency responses
• How gloved hands interact with touchscreens differently from bare hands — and how often gloves are worn
• The emotional weight of lighting in spaces where people are dying, recovering, or in acute distress
• How much nurses trust automated systems — and exactly when and why they override them

On doing this kind of research ethically

Clinical settings have strict protocols around observation and access. Building the trust to be present in these environments required demonstrating genuine respect for patient dignity and staff workflow. Being useful — not just observant — mattered. I wasn’t a consultant visiting for a day; I was someone clinical staff came to know over years.

That sustained relationship is the thing that produces real insight. It’s also what makes this kind of research difficult to replicate on short timelines.