There is a printer down the hall from me, forty-two inches wide, and I have come to love it the way I once loved a ten-foot bubble jet on a racetrack.
It is a Canon roll printer, and it will run a hundred feet if you ask it to. We print scrim vinyl banners on it. We laminate Coroplast. And we do all of it inside the Grey Nuns, for the people who work here.
Because here is what I actually do. I do not design for patients. I design for the teams. Brochures for a department. Handouts and pamphlets. Interior signage, so that a corridor makes sense to somebody walking it for the first time. A banner for Nurses Week, so the people who hold this place together get told, out loud and in large type, that they are seen.
We also look after an auditorium, about a hundred and fifty seats, with projection and speakers and a control room at the back. That control room is mine. When a doctor gives rounds, or a health group brings in a speaker, I am the one at the board making sure the sound is right and the slides come up when they should. It is not glamorous. It is the job, and it matters.
It is teaching me something I did not expect. The design that matters most inside an institution is rarely the design anyone would put in a portfolio. It is the sign that stops a person getting lost on a bad day. It is the banner that makes a tired nurse feel appreciated. It is the microphone that simply works.
I arrived here as an audiovisual technician pushing a cart, and some days I am still pushing it. But I am learning that a print shop and a control room, run with care, are as much a part of how an organisation treats its people as anything written into a policy. That is worth doing well, whether or not anyone ever signs it.