What's an MFA Communication Final Project Like at the Royal College of Art #Shorts

Why It Matters

By turning pain into a shared sensory language, the project offers a blueprint for reducing misdiagnosis and addressing inequities in health‑care communication, directly impacting patient outcomes and design curricula.

Key Takeaways

• Project merges sound, visual, and tactile to convey pain.
• Workshop and film explore sensation-based communication in healthcare.
• Targets structural inequality and misdiagnosis through innovative design.
• Translates auditory pain cues into visual, immersive experiences.
• Creates safe, creative spaces for patient‑provider dialogue and understanding.

Summary

The video showcases a final MFA Communication project at the Royal College of Art, where a designer from the health‑care sector expands beyond practical solutions to investigate how sensations can become a language of their own. The independent research culminated in a workshop and a short film that experiment with anomato‑ and imitative sounds to externalise pain, then translate those auditory signals into visual forms.

The core insight is that pain, traditionally a private, bodily experience, can be communicated through multimodal media, exposing gaps in current health‑care communication. By pairing sound design with visual storytelling, the project highlights how misinterpretations of patient cues can lead to misdiagnoses and perpetuate structural inequality within medical institutions. The work also proposes a methodological framework for designers to create empathetic, data‑driven interventions.

The creator emphasizes, “I wanted to challenge the structural inequality within the healthcare sector and the miscommunications that cause misdiagnosis,” underscoring a commitment to safe, reliable, and creative spaces. The workshop’s hands‑on activities and the film’s sensory narrative serve as concrete examples of how design can bridge the empathy gap between patients and providers.

If adopted more broadly, this approach could reshape patient‑provider interactions, prompting health systems to incorporate sensory‑based diagnostics and fostering interdisciplinary collaborations between designers, clinicians, and technologists. The project signals a shift toward more humane, inclusive communication strategies in medicine.

Original Description

After five years working in the healthcare design sector Dahee Han came to the Royal College of Art to expand her practice on our MFA Communication with the support of a Deputy Vice-Chancellor’s International Scholarship Award.

Her artistic approach centres the patient using immersive experience to facilitate greater understanding, promote care and prevent misdiagnosis.

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