Ze zei het al

For decades, medical research has largely been based on male bodies, leaving a significant gap in how diseases present in women. As a result, women's complaints are often dismissed, misread, or misdiagnosed, sometimes with serious consequences.

We wanted to design an interactive exhibition experience that makes this invisible bias tangible. Rather than simply explaining the problem, we wanted visitors to feel it themselves: to step into the role of a doctor, make a diagnosis, and discover how incomplete information leads to the wrong conclusion.

The final installation pairs three male and three female patients, each sharing the same underlying condition. Visitors watch short video fragments of real people describing their complaints and place a laser-cut acrylic plaque next to each patient as their diagnosis. The men's cases are straightforward to read, the women's much harder. The contrast makes the bias visible without ever telling the visitor they are wrong.

A personal anecdote, split across the experience, follows a woman who received her diagnosis far too late and suffered a heart attack as a result. The installation closes with: "The medical standard was, for decades, based on a single body... and that body was not a woman's."

I composed the background music: a neutral, clinical soundscape, and built the full interactive experience in TouchDesigner, handling everything from video playback to audio routing and plaque detection.

Research & Discovery

The project started from a photograph from Laia Abril's On Mass Hysteria, which pointed us toward how women's health complaints are perceived and dismissed. From there, we researched existing interactive installations, mapped out possible directions, and narrowed our focus to the specific issue of male-based medical research leaving women underdiagnosed.

Ideation & Testing

We built and tested multiple low-fi prototypes over several weeks, with each round of feedback pushing the concept further. Early versions were too broad and message-unclear. Introducing male and female dossiers side by side was the turning point, it immediately made the bias legible to visitors in a way that felt intuitive rather than instructed.

Production & Installation

Production involved recording patient videos with real participants, laser cutting and engraving acrylic plaques, composing and processing the audio in Ableton, and building the full interactive flow in TouchDesigner. Setting up on-site at Foam required working out the spatial layout, visitor guidance, and how to make the room feel like a self-contained world.