We have designed & design directed dental clinic specific for preventing oral diseases. Although it is more common in Japan for dentists to start treatment for patients who acknowledged damages or unusual conditions, Kissei Dental Care also focuses on preventing such damages. To maintain a healthy oral cavity, there are two different sides of approaches that are significant: care and control based on knowledge for dentists, and mindset for patients.

In order to create such situation, we included images and mechanisms of “polishing,” “easy to care,” and “family unit” into both hard and soft aspects.

Since the building has a low ceiling, the design started from drawing the natural lights from the exterior wall surface. The building façade shape is parallel to the windows of lower level office, which is also designed by us. All interior walls are made out of glass except for the x-ray room and stuff room. This brought the great results. Unlike the traditional board with paint, glass doesn't deteriorate over time, it has the universal image of “enamel” material, and the glass wall lets the lights go throughout the floor. There are more benefits such as larger usage area, better communication between stuff, and easier to polish back to the original status.

Additionally, because of the low ceiling, we decided not to go with the ceiling air conditioners and use the floor ones. We did not put a chamber or duct under the floor, but use the whole space as a duct, so we could squeeze the floor plenum to 150mm. There is an additional motor-fan on the floor and it sucks up the air from the under floor, which resulted in a good way. No wind hits the patient directly, and it prevents dryness or dust to enter during the treatment.

The goal of Kissei Dental Care is a “family-unit treatment.” We included some hard and soft designs to improve the awareness, and to prevent spreading the cause for decayed tooth for whole family members.

All the furniture is designed for family and intended to make family interested in teeth. There are some educational elements in the furniture especially for children where they can combine, pile and line them up.

For example, waiting room chairs are in three different sizes so patients can choose depending on their gender or age. They can be connected by family unit using chain and hooks under the seat surface. Seat back is a tooth silhouette and when connected they look like teeth lining up.

The desk in kids-area have several holes and gaps where kids can play around stick color pencils in. There is also storage space for paper and stationery. The cover of the desk is flat and does not have a handle, so it does not look like it opens, but it actually opens up if you press a specific part of it. All of these functions are for educational reasons also.

As for graphics, there are main logo and also symbol mark for original items such as tote bags and button pins. The symbol mark represents Japanese hiragana (phonetic lettering system) letter “は (ha),” which can mean “teeth (歯)” in Japanese. It is the most obvious for patients, but once they bring it outside the clinic, the image of “teeth” disappears and general people would wonder what that symbol stands for. At the same time, when they find out what that is, they would be tempted to tell others and would remember it, thus we thought the simple one letter symbol “は (ha)” could have a commercial meaning. This also catches eyes of every generation of people to “teeth” naturally.

On top of that, we proposed a scrapbook binder that patients can customize with their symptoms and knowledge of teeth. It also has a function like “exchange notes” between clinic and patients. It is to support patients to build knowledge of teeth without any stress.

This clinic became a new place to create a dental clinic communication by achieving two things. First, we incorporated function as the ordinal dental clinic as a place to go when there are problems and as the place to build knowledge and prevent problems, in both hard and soft design. Second, we controlled the whole design of the clinic where patients and clinic has interactive communication oppose to the unilateral treatment.