Completing a Design Internship with Te Whatu Ora Southern on the New Dunedin Hospital Build
Best Apisit Uthakhamkong completed a three month design internship with Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand Southern between 25 June and 21 October 2022, working alongside a second design intern on communications projects tied to the New Dunedin Hospital build as the final paper of his Graduate Diploma in Communication Design at Otago Polytechnic. The placement took him from everyday posters and social media content through to curating the Unearthed Otakou Exhibition of archaeological finds and designing a detailed infographic explaining the new Outpatient Building, work he later described as one of the most broadening experiences of his design education.
What was the New Dunedin Hospital design internship. As the final paper of his Graduate Diploma in Communication Design at Otago Polytechnic, Uthakhamkong had to choose between a solo project, a client brief, or an internship. He chose the internship, and between 25 June and 21 October 2022 he worked inside the communications team at Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand Southern, contributing to a run of projects connected to the New Dunedin Hospital build. His lecturer Denise Narciso and the School of Design at Otago Polytechnic helped arrange the placement, and his supervisor for the three months was Kathryn van Beek, Senior Communications Advisor Southern.
The internship began with a visit to the New Dunedin Hospital project office, situated at the corner opposite the old chocolate factory site that had by then become a construction yard. Uthakhamkong worked alongside a second design intern, Tomas de Silva, and the pair split their time between the project office, Wakari Hospital, and Dunedin Hospital, catching the shuttle bus between sites and eating lunch in the ground floor cafe at Wakari. Their shared workspace was a meeting room on the third floor near the communications team office, though the internship was flexible enough that plenty of work also happened from home, from cafes, and back at Otago Polytechnic.
Uthakhamkong later admitted he arrived at the hospital a little nervous. He had never worked in a healthcare setting before, and worried it might be as intimidating as hospitals often look on screen. That fear did not last. In an October 2022 interview with Kathryn van Beek for an Otago Polytechnic news story, he said the internship appealed to him precisely because it let him bring his design skills to a place built around helping people, and that once he settled in, the hospital turned out to be far less daunting than he had expected, filled instead with friendly, welcoming staff.
Day to day, the internship covered a genuinely wide brief. Uthakhamkong designed posters, social media content, digital screens, and event signage, took portrait photos of staff, produced short videos, and went through an iterative logo design process for a team within the hospital. His toolkit stretched across Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom, and Premiere Pro, alongside Cava, the platform used by the wider communications team. He has said the biggest shift for him as a designer was learning to think from the hospital’s point of view rather than his own, fitting his creative ideas around an existing brand and an institutional voice rather than starting from a blank page.
The internship also took an unexpected turn into local history. As excavation for the new hospital progressed, contractors uncovered archaeological artefacts on the construction site, material that had been sitting under what was once a seashore long before the area became a residential suburb. Working from a brief set by Kathryn van Beek and in partnership with the New Zealand Heritage Properties team.
Best was tasked with designing the Unearthed Ōtākou Exhibition to display the finds in the Staff Cafe at Dunedin Hospital. Drawing on the site’s own history, he built the exhibition’s visual language around seashells, bricks, old villa houses, and 1800s fashion, using calming blues and greens and restrained typography, and worked with photographer Tomas de Silva to capture the artefacts before blending and cleaning the images in Photoshop and Illustrator. A virtual tour of the finished exhibition was later published on Spatial, extending its reach well beyond the Staff Cafe itself.
A second major project asked him to make an entire building legible at a glance. The New Dunedin Hospital’s Outpatient Building, due for completion in 2025, is a genuinely complex piece of infrastructure, and Uthakhamkong was briefed to design an infographic explaining it clearly while still fitting Te Whatu Ora’s branding.
The finished piece walks through 78 foundation piles, a buried time capsule, two Allied Health gyms, six multi disciplinary outpatient clinics, sixteen Medical Day Unit consultation spaces, and four day surgery theatres, alongside MRI, CT, ultrasound, and X-ray services, and reflects the building’s co-design with mana whenua. Getting there took three full versions and roughly seventy hours of work in Illustrator and Photoshop: about forty hours sketching and building the first draft, twenty more reworking the building’s perspective after feedback from the communications team, and a final ten hours of refinement before the infographic was signed off as a resource for both hospital staff and the public.
The wider New Dunedin Hospital project that Uthakhamkong’s internship fed into is one of the largest healthcare builds in the South Island’s history. Alongside the Outpatient Building, an Inpatient Building is due for completion in 2028, and together the two buildings will offer 421 beds, capacity for up to 21 operating theatres, and 40 ICU or high dependency beds, with the project forecast to deliver an estimated 429 million dollar boost to Dunedin’s GDP during construction. For a design intern still finishing his diploma, working on a project of that scale, and getting to see his infographic used as a genuine public information tool, was a considerably bigger stage than most student placements offer.
Reflecting on the experience afterwards, Uthakhamkong pointed to the adjustment of moving from Bangkok to Dunedin as its own kind of learning curve. He has joked about the shock of finding almost everything closed by nine at night, a stark contrast to Bangkok’s round the clock pace, but has also spoken warmly about the quieter lifestyle and the friendliness of the people he met.
Alongside the internship, he was serving as President of The Peace Club at the University of Otago, running meditation sessions and, in the same period, travelling to Wellington to interview ambassadors from Germany, Singapore, and Malaysia for a documentary on peace. Between the hospital, the exhibition, the infographic, and his community work with The Peace Club, the internship remains one of the experiences Uthakhamkong recommends most strongly to other design students weighing up a placement against a solo final project.
Date
25 June to 21 October 2022
Role
Design intern, Communications team
Organisation
Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand Southern
Supervisor
Kathryn van Beek, Senior Communications Advisor Southern