Unit 1 Proposal

    For my public space, I am thinking about choosing a hospital. More specifically, I would be choosing Harris Downtown. I find this space appealing because it is somewhere that I personally have spent alot of time for many various reasons. It has personal meaning to me because of past events that have occured in hospitals and because I am a nursing major. I have spent time there as a consumer and a bystander, but also as a student in a nursing position.  It particularly appeals to me because it is a place I am passionate about and a place where I get to do something that I like. 

     Upon observation, I expect to find some new aspects of the hospital that I have never observed. Typically, I have been in hospitals either with family members at a traumatic time, or for my clinicals, during which I have been focused on patients and patient care. I see this as an opportunity to take a step back and see the hospital as a public space and uncover some aspects and observations I have never taken the time to notice before. 

     Since I am a future employer of a hospital but also have been, and possibly will be a future customer of a hospital, I would say that in some ways I am a part of a target audience. Hospitals appeal to people in need of health care and people in dire emergency and help. It is sometimes hard to predict what kind of target audience hospitals will have. 

     There are many pre-concieved ideas that I may have that could influence my objective observation. Because past events involving my own family members have occured at this facility, I may have a negative connotation when thinking about my own prior experiences at this hospital. To overcome that, I will need to step back and view the hospital objectively on the basis of the target audience and what the space offers them instead of what it has offered me in the past. Additionally, since I am a nursing major and spend a lot of time there working during my clinicals, I will need to not lean on my own experiences as a nursing student there as basis for objectively observing the space. I need to objectively observe it from the standpoint of dealing with the target audience rather than from the standpoint of an employer type position. 

     I will need to step back from my past experiences of all kinds to be able to objectively survery the public space this hospital offers in order to effectively write this paper.