Medical Futures Lab

We are thrilled to announce a newly funded project of the Medical Futures Lab: the Medical Media Arts Hub!

The Medical Media Arts Hub will be an innovative online platform and media creation space where Rice undergraduates will help medical professionals amplify their health messages through creative design.

Students with arts, media, writing, and programming skills will get to apply and refine their abilities in real-world contexts as they work with physicians, nurses, public health practitioners, and patients in the Texas Medical Center who need help visualizing information for health communication. The Medical Media Arts Hub will generate direct benefits for all participants: students get to develop their portfolio through an applied, relevant context; health professionals get some reverse mentoring by digital natives and media that helps them improve their communication with patients; patients get to actively shape their relationships with providers through a collaborative process that empowers them to attain better health.

As if that’s not amazing enough, we’re going to expand this platform to engage medical students and residents in the media creation process as well. One of our core beliefs is that everyone involved in health care could learn a huge amount and improve their practice by participating in the act of public, creative communication. It’s a form of digital literacy. As Howard Rheingold puts it in Net Smart,

“When you start engaging in knowledge or media production, you tend to develop a much more sophisticated understanding of how knowledge and media is produced more generally.”

Possible project types include:

short videos, graphic design, infographics, software applications, virtual models, photography, documentary film, animations, sketchnotes, web design, creative writing, just plain good writing, painting, sculpture, and other forms of visual media arts.

Pretty great, right? Do you want in?

If you are a health professional or e-patient with a project idea – a visualization or communication problem you want to solve – leave us a comment (tab at upper left). If you are a creative professional in or near Houston and you’d like to be a guest critic, let us know! We want to have face time be part of this process, but there will be plenty of opportunities for non-local folks to participate, too. Stay tuned for more news on this project (part two of this post) later this week.