Sky Factory designs photographic, illuminated ceiling tiles to help enhance patient comfort.

Premier Business Partners:

Medical Structures

Hippocrates once said, “Nature heals – not physicians.” Much has changed in the medical world since the founder of medicine spoke these words – most of it for the better – although in many cases it seems some care providers have forgotten about the role of nature in the healing process.   

Now, The Sky Factory founder Bill Witherspoon is bringing nature back into the medical setting through the development of backlit ceilings featuring beautiful skies and edgelit wall systems that feature wild landscapes.       

Witherspoon, an artist and entrepreneur, spent more than 40 years of his career painting and photographing natural surroundings when he realized there could be applications for his images in places other than a picture frame on the mantle. In the late 1990s, while working in biotechnology and also as an artist, Witherspoon thought of the concept for the business.   

“I took lots of sky photos, and I looked into the technology of printing them on ceiling panels, and for what I wanted to do, the technology just wasn’t there,” he recalls.    

“Then, in 2001, I wanted to get back to the technology, and there had been substantial developments in inkjet pigments and laminations and in lighting, and I thought this was the time to go for it.”

Healthy Impact
In 2002, Witherspoon launched The Sky Factory to bring the sky image ceilings into the healthcare setting. “I came to the conclusion that the sky was a very powerful expression of nature and it has a very unique impact on human awareness, human emotion and physiology,” Witherspoon says.    

“In healthcare, a lot of times people are captive observers of the ceiling, simply because they have no choice and they are often in need of some healing influence, so what could be better than nature?” Witherspoon asks.    

The company’s illuminated ceiling systems are enhancing the comfort medical providers can give their clients while in their care. Healthcare designers in particular are engaged in an effort to create care centers that provide the patient with optimum relaxation and ease during their stay.    

Its signature products, known as Sky Factory Luminous SkyCeilings, are high-resolution digital photographs of the sky laminated to translucent plastic tiles mounted in a patented aluminum frame that snaps into any standard ceiling grid. The images are lit from behind by Sky Factory’s own T5 fluorescent or LED lighting.    

Other products include Sky Factory’s Luminous Virtual Windows, which feature photographs of outdoor landscapes in a window-like frame. Less than 2 inches deep, these virtual windows can be mounted on walls and come in several sizes ranging from 22-by-40 inches to 34-by-63 inches, and even larger custom sizes. Several trim styles in various woods or brushed aluminum complete the window-like effect.   

Although healthcare remains its largest revenue generator, Sky Factory has branched out into other commercial office and residential applications. Sky Factory primarily works with architects, designers, general contractors and facilities managers to develop custom applications for the end-user. Today, the company’s portfolio is filled with well-known healthcare clients, including the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, Saint Joseph Medical System, the ABC Cancer Center in Mexico City, the University of San Francisco Medical Center and Cape Cod Hospital.

Designed to Please
Sky Factory employs a team of “Sky Designers” who collaborate with customers on the size, image and setting of the SkyCeilings. “Every one of our products is custom, and our designers really get to the core of what we are doing here and convey that to our clients,” Witherspoon says. “In the preliminary design process, we come up with sketches and send out lots of JPGs to make sure our clients like what they are getting. We work with the staff of a facility to get a lot of participation. We’ve found that these people appreciate being involved in the creative process.   

“The design possibilities are infinite,” Witherspoon says. He and the creative team devote time to capturing new images in the field, giving clients thousands of images to choose from. Making new still images for the company’s extensive image catalog requires great technical skill and patience. The process of capturing high-definition footage for Sky Factory’s newest product, SkyV, can be an even more demanding process. A seven-day location shoot may only produce a few hours of usable footage, Witherspoon notes. Sky Factory  photographers travel around the country, as well as near its Iowa headquarters acquiring images.   

Sky Factory invests in the company in other unique ways. Although the impact of art on patients is a relatively new area of research, Witherspoon says it is an area where the company is investing resources. “Last year, we started our own program to support scientific research on SkyCeilings so that we can more deeply  understand what we are doing,” he notes. “In my view, SkyCeilings are a technology and tool for healing.”  

In several external studies, researchers have concluded that images of nature help patients relax during treatment, which can improve the delivery of the treatment, speed recovery time, reduce the use of pain medication, and therefore allow them to leave facilities sooner, decreasing personnel and supply costs.

Creating an Illusion
The relaxing benefits of a Sky Factory SkyCeiling are based on the quality of the illusion of sky they create. A Luminous SkyCeiling, mounted into a standard hung ceiling grid, is composed of three basic components. At the base is the patented aluminum frame called a SkyTile Elevator. The Elevator snaps into the ceiling grid and creates a raised housing for the image tile.   

Sky Factory uses proprietary, large format, high-resolution photographs of skies, trees and blossoms that can be enlarged to ceiling dimensions without distorting color or image. The photographs are printed on a translucent media and laminated to the acrylic image tiles, called SkyTiles.   

Illuminating the image is a Sky Factory manufactured daylight-balanced light source. The lighting is designed to perfectly illuminate the SkyTiles evenly from corner to corner, which is critical to creating the illusion. “The lighting is also beautiful for vividly illuminating color,” Witherspoon says. “The real key is that the mind reads it as real daylight.”   

The ceilings are sold as a system and can be designed as rectilinear configurations that snap right into the ceiling grid, or as circles, ellipses and other custom shapes.