Introduction

Creative forms: booklets by the hospital senses collective

“…As Matt Hayler argues, ‘[f]orm and content are always entangled, with forms supporting, competing with, or codetermining the meanings of their contents’ ( Hayler 2021 , 83). This argument builds on and supports a range of scholarship on the ways that books and booklets—as objects, not just as vessels for information—can help people to think critically, and to use embodied ways of reading (and, in some places, listening, smelling, touching) to enhance their thinking ( ; Bolaki 2020 ; Lupton and Lipps 2018 ). It builds on work in the medical humanities that explores the value of form and genre for exploring themes around health and the senses, including artists’ books ( Bolaki and Čiricaitė 2017 ), comics ( Williams and Annandale 2020 ), zines ( Cooper 2023 ) and multisensory digital magazines ( Stehlikova 2020 -).…”

“…We worked with book designer Tom Abba, who brought expertise in the interactions between books and the world (e.g. Abba et al 2013 andDovey, Abba, andPullinger 2021), and our form evolved in dialogue with the content, and with each other. In places we have included concertina pages, which prompt the user to unfold with care and prompt slow, gradual engagement; the longest of these folds out to four pages, and is used to explore the theme of 'waiting' (figure 4).…”

“…The viewfinder also encourages people to move around with the book, which offers another form of embodied reading that engages movement and the sense of proprioception. As Jonathan Dovey, Tom Abba, and Kate Pullinger argue in their work on ambient literature, ‘the act of walking and attending to both the content and the contextual environment produces a particular kind of embodied experience by engaging movement as well as the other senses’ ( Dovey, Abba, and Pullinger 2021 , 13). In light of our audience, we anticipate that some of our users actually may do so within healthcare spaces, while others may use the books to practise close, embodied looking, thereby using that process to think about hospitals using their own remembered experience of such places.…”