A Medical Imaging Stand for the Age of AI
We often judge the strength of a design by how long it is meant to last, and make easy assumptions about how designers respond. Temporary, people think, means a design that stops at a gesture, or stays on the surface.
That is plainly not the case. For an exhibition lasting just four days, we and United Imaging spent six months preparing.
We kept asking how a temporary stand could show the vitality and endurance of an idea. How could visitors, in the short time they had, feel the vision of "equal healthcare for all"? And more importantly, how should design today respond to the medicine of tomorrow?
Chapter 1 · A Search
United Imaging provides customers around the world with a full range of high-performance medical imaging, diagnostic and treatment equipment and life-science instruments, all developed in-house, and works to make advanced medical equipment and services more accessible worldwide. A world leader in medical imaging equipment, it draws crowds to its stand at every CMEF, the China International Medical Equipment Fair.
E Studio was invited to design its stand for CMEF 2024.
This was the first time United Imaging's subsidiaries appeared together, with the product lines of several companies shown on a single stand. It was also the launch of the group's first consumer products, marking its formal entry into consumer healthcare.
These two firsts were a challenge for us too. Under many constraints, we had to give each subsidiary's products their place without disrupting the visitor route. Close communication was the key to the collaboration: it let us find the balance among many demands and make the most of the design.
On a site of nearly 1,800 m² we laid out four exhibition zones: diagnostic equipment for professional buyers, health products for consumers, the Rubik's Cube operating room, and artificial intelligence, along with a product launch area that seats a hundred people, to make the experience on site as rich as it could be.
Chapter 2 · A Connection
The whole stand is open, giving the products more room to be shown. Visitors can come and go freely, which also breaks the stiffness of a conventional product display.
We wanted the design to create a setting equally good for viewing and for experience: one that lifts people out of the ordinary around them into a place of medicine that has already entered the age of AI, open to everything technology may bring.
Interwoven curves keep the layout in dynamic balance with the flow of people. They open up more views while avoiding the dullness of seeing everything at a glance, so attention turns instead to the pleasure of discovering products, technology and the future.
Continuously curving display walls embrace more product information, while keeping the zones open to one another and connected.
Finally, following the natural turn of the curves, the staircase was set into the middle of the stand, uniting function and form.
Chapter 3 · A Way of Thinking
At a trade fair, display alone is not enough. Every product represents the vision and hopes of a group of people and a company. So rather than holding to conventional display, we brought curatorial thinking into the design. When a display becomes an exhibition, the products merge with the space. Walking through it, visitors come closer to United Imaging Microelectronics' uOrigin hearing aids and sense the people-first idea behind them, giving the stand's theme a more vivid form.
On the left, headsets of the kind often found in art exhibitions draw visitors quickly into the story. Further in, United Imaging Microelectronics' hearing health solutions unfold; then, at a very large LED screen on the right, visitors listen to a piece of beautiful sound. Only at the end do they reach the point where feeling and reason meet: the hearing experience columns and the product display.
Most of the time we can only imagine our way into empathy, and talks and explanations alone rarely help anyone truly understand people with hearing loss. Through curation, we wanted to push the limits of product display, convey the emotion and atmosphere behind it precisely, and bring more creativity and life to the trade-fair stand as a type of design.
Chapter 4 · A Future
AI is no longer an obscure term. Yet to make that sense of the future real in an exhibition, simply showing medical devices or describing technical prowess in words would stay on the surface. We therefore kept to a curatorial approach for the AI zone, helping visitors clearly understand what United Imaging Intelligence's integrated uAI NEXUS platform is.
The design of United Imaging Healthcare's area for ceiling-suspended equipment centres on a sense of being there. The functional structures are mainly white and black, letting the background recede so that visitors moving through keep their attention on the equipment. For safety, the entire stand was built in a factory and delivered to the site only after inspection.
To express technology and the future, we went beyond colour and brought in materials that borrow light. Across the zone, an LED multimedia scroll adds depth with its translucent quality and, together with the glossy black floor, creates a deeply immersive space.
Brief does not mean fleeting. A design with more life and endurance can turn the temporary into something lasting.
An exhibition of only four days holds E Studio's thinking about design today.
Client
United Imaging Group
Location
National Exhibition and Convention Center, Shanghai
Area
1,800 m²
Completion Date
2024.04
Design Firm
E Studio
Lead Designer
Fan, Junjian
Zhou, Xuanzhuo
Zhu, Xiao
Design Team
Liu, Shuqi
Zhang, Jieying
Liu, Ying
Huang, Chenxi
Wang, Yiran
Huang, Qiqi
Fang, Guiyun
Hao, Xingyun
FF&E
Zhou, Jing
Photographer
ZC Studio
United Imaging Healthcare Brand and Marketing Strategy Center