Alissa Rees

Talent

An impactful project inspired by the designer’s own experience recovering in hospital.

Alissa Rees is reinventing the IV pole often used in hospitals for a more dynamic, dignified experience. As a conceptual thinker and a special interest in healthcare design, Rees finds solutions with a poetic touch. She graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2017 with twenty concepts to humanise the hospital. The concepts concerned communication, mobility, atmosphere, mental distraction and balance.

Rees was the winner of the Accenture innovation Award 2017 and the innovation- and best overall prize on the Brains Award 2017, with her project ‘IV-Walk’, a portable IV-pole that stimulates mobility in hospitals. She presented her work in cities as Milan, Paris, Amsterdam and Las Vegas.

Next to her conceptual thinking, she has a multidisciplinary interest in movies that express the peculiar behaviour of the human being, radio making and prose stories. She is able translate complex matter into sensitive concepts for a broader audience. Rees likes to give personal layers to her projects.

She introduced her new project ‘Foliage filter’ during the Dutch Design Week Eindhoven 2017 and her product IV-Walk was internationally launched at the CES in Las Vegas 2018.

Credits: Design Indaba

Project: IV-walk

A lot can be said for the value of empathy in design, but design inspired by a real, lived experience is pretty powerful in itself.

The work of Design Academy Eindhoven graduate, Alissa Rees was directly inspired by her experience in hospital. She spent one and a half years undergoing treatment for leukemia. Her stand-out project, IV-Walk is a portable IV pole that stimulates mobility, thereby speeding up recovery time.

With the removal of all the unnecessary links, this product has the potential to significantly improve the lives of patients.

Two more projects were borne out of Alissa’s experience. Balance your Bead is a way for patients to consciously monitor their activity by visually displaying active days vs. lazy days, encouraging them to keep the balance.

Baby Farm Toys are filled with straw, wool and earth – elements found in nature that aid the building up of a strong immune system. She presented her work at the first-ever antenna, a conference for the best global design graduates.

The project is a poignant reminder that at the heart of the system that enables modern living is a steel shipping container.