Overhearing: An Attuning Approach to Noise in Danish Hospitals

Denmark is building new and improved super hospitals, based on a vision of improving overall quality by switching the focus from hospitals for treatment to hospitals for healing, guided by research in the field of evidence-based design and healing architecture. Users mention noise as one of the main stressors and research has discovered that noise levels in hospitals continue to rise. Noise has therefore become a central point of concern, recommending strategies to reduce measurable and perceived noise levels.However, these strategies do not support the need to feel like an integral part of the shared hospital environment, which is also a key element in creating healing environments linked to a reductionist framework underlying the field. This framework regards broad concepts such as noise and silence as objects with quantifiable properties, and assumes that these properties can be understood independently of the perceiver as a bodily and situated subject. The aim of this dissertation is accordingly to develop an alternative framework capable of accommodating the multi-sensory, affective and atmospheric conditions that influence the experience of noise, with a view to complementing the existing approaches in the field.  Consequently, the dissertation develops an ecological framework capable of accommodating these issues, established by viewing sound and listening through the lens of atmospheres. The attuning approach highlights the reciprocal relationship between the way in which atmospheres condition shared rhythms that shape us, but also the way in which we can tune them in different ways. In the context of sound and listening, this creates the potential of ecological overhearing as an atmospheric mode of listening capable of reconfiguring habitual background and foregrounding relationships. Attuning strategies should thus provide opportunities for diverse acoustic situations and possibilities for active choice-making to meet different and shifting needs through an enactive approach in order to enhance empowerment and ecological overhearing. Embedding diverse enactive sound installations and interactive sound technology in hospitals can facilitate such zones of overhearing. These zones become places for ruptures that strengthen the possibilities for engaging in counter-attunements of existing negative atmospheres. In this way, zones of overhearing not only provide continual sense of presence without demanding full attention, but also create ample opportunities for the restoration of  attention.The dissertation takes an experimental practice-based approach through artistic- and constructive design-research and comprises six peer-reviewed papers (Part IV), framed by a general overview article (Parts I-III) that develops the theoretical and methodological foundation for the papers, and provides a synthesis and discussion of their main findings. The practice-based work is founded on a range of experiments, but focuses on two main experiments: Light, Landscape & Voices and KidKit, and the way in which they elicit sensitivities within the topic of investigation. This contribution also concerns the concrete development of installations through the experiments. These installations are in themselves manifestations of and challenges to hypotheses about the topic I aim to address.

Crafting atmospheres for Healthcare Design

This work contributes to the growing body of work, conducted on the vicinities between well-being and biomedical treatments in health design. The article presents and discusses the design of the new delivery rooms at a Danish hospital in Hjørring, including the multi-sensory artwork: Nordjyske stemninger (Moods of Northern Jutland).  The authors are both artists, architects, and researchers in this project, thus it is not the purpose of his article to report evaluation results. However, it is our intention to share and discuss contemporary healthcare design strategies and point to the importance of considering the interplay between cultural, social change, and environment in order to bridge the know-do gap in healing architecture. Based on our work we give a concrete example of a case aimed at re-introducing art in healthcare environments, supporting the caregiver, the laboring mother, and her companion in the existential and life-changing moment. The article includes descriptions of the design process including interviews, observations, and reflections. In this case, we want to argue that the gap between visions and implementation in evidence-based design and healing architecture, must be understood as a symptom of a deeper epistemological and philosophical challenge concerning the dichotomous and demarcating understanding of the relation between the human and its surroundings, obstructing ecological coherence and validity and silo stacking of results not utilizing the rich potentiality of interdisciplinarity synergies. As it is difficult to convey a bodily and sensory experience in only words and images, we hope that the reader will use their imagination while reading the descriptions of a situated experience throughout the article. The Ukrainian sculptor Alexander Archipenko described the cause and impulse of creative motivation as seeing the absence of a thing. With this lens we invite the reader behind the scenes in the creation of somesthetic design of the new delivery rooms, now being the background of more than 1.000 births a year in the Northern part of Jutland. The argument of This article uses artistic practice to explore a new potential healthcare practice, with overseen and neglected potentialities in a supportive somesthetic healthcare design.  The article is structured in four parts: Healing environments, Somesthetic design framework, The sensory delivery room, and Reflection

Introduktion: Levende fremtider

Intet resum

»En mexicansk blondine der sparker røv«: – Imitation og innovation i markedsføring af illegale rusmidler

AbstractIn recent decades, the selling and purchasing of illicit drugs has been increasingly mediated by use of communication technologies such as mobile phones and social media apps. While the risk of police intervention has traditionally restricted dealers’ use of advertisements to attract customers, the increasing technologization of retail-level drug markets has opened up new avenues for dealers’ use of proactive marketing. This article contributes to the understanding of current transformations of the retail-level drug market by providing insight into how drug dealers compete for and try to attract customers by use of strategic and targeted advertising. Based on an in-depth analysis of the textual and visual content of 99 illicit »drug commercials« circulated through SMS-based (Short Message Service) drug lines, we demonstrate how drug dealers draw on a number of psychological and cognitive techniques such as repetition, association, humour, hooks, slogans and storytelling, all of which are also found in legal marketing. We conclude by arguing that there is a need for more studies on how »drug commercials« affect drug users’ purchasing practices, including their choice of dealer

Genome-Wide Association Study and Functional Characterization Identifies Candidate Genes for Insulin-Stimulated Glucose Uptake

Distinct tissue-specific mechanisms mediate insulin action in fasting and postprandial states. Previous genetic studies have largely focused on insulin resistance in the fasting state, where hepatic insulin action dominates. Here we studied genetic variants influencing insulin levels measured 2 h after a glucose challenge in \u3e55,000 participants from three ancestry groups. We identified ten new loci (P \u3c 5 × 10-8) not previously associated with postchallenge insulin resistance, eight of which were shown to share their genetic architecture with type 2 diabetes in colocalization analyses. We investigated candidate genes at a subset of associated loci in cultured cells and identified nine candidate genes newly implicated in the expression or trafficking of GLUT4, the key glucose transporter in postprandial glucose uptake in muscle and fat. By focusing on postprandial insulin resistance, we highlighted the mechanisms of action at type 2 diabetes loci that are not adequately captured by studies of fasting glycemic traits