Three Absurd Tools For Coping With Waiting Room Misery

Philip Lüschen’s Waiting Room Survival Kit makes light of pre-appointment frustrations. Going to the doctor’s office wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the wait beforehand. Those waiting rooms, filled with bad magazines and a diverse array of germs, are places where time slows to a crawl, where minutes seem like hours, and where human misery sits openly under fluorescent lights. Philip Lüschen, a designer based in Amsterdam, thought it was a shame that we all went into these places defenseless (apparently the scourge of the waiting room transcends oceans and borders), so he dreamed up a set of tools designed specifically for coping with all those small pre-appointment injustices. The items themselves were born out of painstaking research. Lüschen explains that he "waited undercover in different waiting rooms … as a patient without an ...