Steelwater Ltd

Designing for clarity in a world built for speed.

Steelwater Ltd builds software for healthcare. We design virtual environments worth stepping into, for people who spend their days giving their full attention to someone else.

A registered Ohio company.

Run by Sharon Phillips.

Looking up through a rock opening at a bright sky, a single bird in flight
From The Vault Enterprise
The work
A weathered stone temple complex overgrown with trees, from The Vault Enterprise

The Vault Enterprise

A five minute immersive environment for clinical staff, opened in a browser. Somewhere to go between one patient and the next, made so that the few minutes a hospital can spare are worth taking.

Every environment is built by hand, by people who think carefully about what a place can hold. The first pilot sites are being selected now.

If five minutes somewhere else gives one clinician a moment of relief on a hard day, that is the whole reason for the work.

Deliberate Awareness

Published work

A body of writing and digital tools on attention and deliberate practice: the Reflection Series, The Noticing Space, and two web applications. Years spent on one question, how people find their way back to the present, and the ground everything since has grown from.

How we work

Slowly, on purpose

A written specification before any code, and a practicing clinician's reading before any build. The care goes in at the start, which is where you feel it at the end.

Grounded in the research

The work rests on attention-restoration research, decades of it, on what happens to people when they spend time somewhere restorative. We build toward what the evidence already shows.

Nobody is counted

Our products hold no personal identifiers at all. A clinician who steps in is never named or followed, and being unobserved is part of what lets the five minutes do their work.