Celebrating 70 years of the NHS

A group of academics and students from Goldsmiths, University of London have created a unique installation to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the NHS.

The Long Run is a seven metre marble run combining physical computing, graphics and interactive mechanisms, and is designed to illustrate how the NHS supports people throughout their lives.

It was commissioned by the British Medical Association (BMA) and British Medical Journal (BMJ) and was unveiled at their headquarters in Tavistock Place, London on Thursday 5 July.

The project has been led by Dr Theo Papatheodorou (Senior Lecturer in Computing), Jesse Wolpert (creative technologist and Computing Summer Programme Leader) and Tom Chambers (creative technologist and Goldsmiths alumnus). Seven students from the MFA/MA Computational Arts also worked as professionals on the project.

It is an attempt to create a physical data visualisation or data materialisation, using NHS data that demonstrates how much each patient costs on average during a specific year of their lives.