What is it about?
This study shares a personal story of staying in a hotel during COVID-19 quarantine in Kuwait. It shows how everyday things—like food, air, technology, and room layout—affect a person’s health and wellbeing. Using photos and simple maps, the author explains how they coped with isolation by exercising in a small space, managing meals, staying connected online, and finding comfort in views outside the window. The study highlights that both people and objects play a role in shaping quarantine experiences. It suggests that better-designed quarantine systems, with attention to physical and mental health, can improve people’s wellbeing in the future.
Featured Image
Photo by Carol Magalhães on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Offers a rare visual, first-person account of hotel quarantine, highlighting how everyday objects and environments shape health and wellbeing. By linking human and non-human interactions through design thinking, it brings fresh insight to pandemic experiences. The work can inform more humane quarantine systems, making it valuable for design, health, and policy audiences.
Perspectives
Writing this piece allowed me to reflect on my own quarantine experience and make sense of how I maintained health and wellbeing in isolation. By documenting everyday moments visually, I aimed to reveal overlooked connections between people and their environment, and to contribute a more personal, human perspective to discussions on quarantine design.
Dr Juhri Selamet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Applying health design thinking to uncover actors in the sustenance of health and wellbeing during hotel quarantine in kuwait, Visual Communication, November 2022, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/14703572221126514.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
