Cheong Wen Xuan
Humanising the Clinic
Designing the spaces between people, systems, and experiences, starting with empathy.
Wen Xuan is a designer driven by curiosity about how things work behind the scenes; within the systems, services, and environments people encounter every day. She is interested in applying her design skills across multiple fields, using a human-centred approach to shape more inclusive and thoughtful experiences, and better ways of creating them together.
Her practice is rooted in collaboration. To uncover root causes and surface gaps that often go unnoticed, she works to co-create with the people involved, rather than designing from a single perspective. She believes the most meaningful insights and applicable solutions emerge when designing with people, not just for them.
With a background in mass communication and client-facing roles, Wen Xuan brings a strong ability to listen, facilitate dialogue, and navigate diverse perspectives. These experiences shape her approach that is grounded in clarity, empathy, and connection.
Humanising the Clinic
Humanising the Clinic reveals how both patient experience and clinic workflows are deeply interconnected and continuously shaped through everyday interactions, movement and care. In partnership with the National University Hospital (NUH) Ophthalmology Clinic, this project examines how healthcare spaces can better balance patient experience with staff workflow efficiency.
Ethnographic fieldwork, participatory research sessions and co-design sessions revealed that behind visible operations are improvised decisions, constant communication and continuous small adjustments made by staff, particularly Patient Care Associates (PCAs).
This project focuses on a physical co-design toolkit designed to bridge the gap between non-designers' lived experiences and designers' spatial knowledge, creating a shared language between them. The toolkit is designed to be intuitive and structured so that it is accessible to both non-designers and designers. It uses simple tactile materials and measurement tools to combine the precision of design thinking for designers with accessibility for non-designers, grounding abstract design conversations with spatial representation.
This project sheds light on the invisible labour of PCAs by externalising the physical and cognitive demands of their work, giving form to often overlooked labour. It creates a shared language bridging experience, labour and spatial design, positioning those with an intimate understanding of the system as co-authors in its reconfiguration instead of subjects of a study.
Ultimately, Humanising the Clinic reframes design as participatory, creating tools that enable lived experiences, hidden workflows and overlooked perspectives to become visible, discussable and collaboratively reshaped. It positions healthcare design not as the creation of fixed solutions, but as an ongoing process of collective understanding, adaptation and care, where more empathetic clinical environments are continuously shaped by the people who sustain them and not just for them.
A key area of focus emerged through observing the relationship between motherhood and social life. Mothers are often perceived as socially isolated, but this thesis argues that socialising is not absent by choice. Rather, it is often constrained by circumstance. During engagements, mothers were frequently interrupted, with their attention divided between conversation and caregiving. In one instance, a mother was feeding her child while simultaneously teaching her how to play a game, making it difficult for her to fully engage. These moments revealed that social participation is often shaped by competing responsibilities rather than a lack of desire for connection.
To explore this further, the project developed a series of visual maps documenting mothers’ daily schedules. Using layered transparent sheets, the maps reveal how caregiving, household labour, paid work, and personal time frequently overlap rather than exist as separate activities. Across participants, a recurring pattern emerged: socialising often takes place only when it intersects with another routine, such as grocery shopping, bringing children to the playground, or during short break times. This reframes mothers’ social lives as adaptive and embedded within care, while highlighting opportunities for more inclusive forms of community engagement.