Collections

Curator Ravid Rovner

Ravid Rovner is a historian of concepts, lecturer, facilitator of workshops on rhizomatic mind mapping, and expert in theoretical design research methodologies. Her doctoral thesis deals with the history of the concept of originality in the arts. Rovner has written the high-school design studies program for the Ministry of Education.

The sense of distress brought upon by the COVID-19 pandemic is the starting point of the projects in this collection. The five project presents spaces, either virtual or hybrid (combining the physical and digital), to different audiences: workers in a corporation, chronic patients, and high-risk populations. Strategically, they operate similarly: they are adjusted to periods of a global pandemic, to routine living, and to everything in-between. Instead of a temporary hardship that needs to be alleviated specifically, the five designers see in the limitations the potential for redesigning life, an opening for positive interpersonal communication that provides health, personal and social security.
Adi Edlis has created a methodology for redesigning the open workspace in hi-tech companies so that it retains its key values – collaboration, innovation, and socialization – and protect workers’ health. The methodology includes, among other things, specifying a “collaboration office” that optimally integrates working from home with working in a shared space. Advantages include the reduction of rental costs by reducing office space.
Gadi Lissak has designed an AI app that encourages virtual fitness meetings to protect employee health at times of working from home. The application can be personalized by the users to meet unique needs; it encourages self-efficacy, forms community bonds, and provides measureable feedback.
Anat Shapira, diagnosed with breast cancer during her studies, proposes a model for a hybrid clinic that will provide a therapeutic and emotional safety net for youngsters recovering from cancer. The clinic includes a personalized recovery plan focused on rehabilitation and the return to normal living.
The needs of another patient population have been met in a project by Adiva Beigel-Peyser. Peyser has created an interphase for treating inflammatory bowel diseases that collects and analyzes individual data, monitors indicators and reminds the patients of future procedures. If necessary, the patient receives direct responses from an AI assistant that connects her and a personal nurse, who also provides emotional support.
Another project that addresses patient-caregiver communication is by Michal Chen Shachnai. Saknai proposes a platform for hybrid communication that contains a database available to both physician and patient, programmed for joint updates by the two parties in sickness and in health.

Ravid Rovner is a historian of concepts, lecturer, facilitator of workshops on rhizomatic mind mapping, and expert in theoretical design research methodologies. Her doctoral thesis deals with the history of the concept of originality in the arts. Rovner has written the high-school design studies program for the Ministry of Education.