Designing for wellbeing

Social distance as a design challenge
For designers, the public healthcare context is challenging due to the
complexity emerging from the legally bound public system, multi-layered
and intricate bureaucracy, inflexible IT systems and heterogeneous and
site-specific requirements. Yet the biggest challenge is the conflict of interest
between citizens demanding the best care and their providers forced to
act within a framework of rules that limit and rigidly distribute the scarce
resources. This brings forth four groups of key stakeholders in our process:
The healthcare system, represented by administrators who look at
health services in terms of the costs incurred, the volume of patients
treated, the scarcity of the available resources and the efficiency of their
operations. Its objective is to establish rules and build systems that ensure
the accomplishment of set goals.
The front-line healthcare personnel, engaged in direct interactions with
patients, who provide care to individual patients as their main responsibility.
Healthcare personnel, by profession, have a more patient-centric view,
but their work is restricted within the structures of the public healthcare
system.
The citizens, also referred to as patients or clients, expect to receive the
best individual care possible without being fully aware of the challenges
facing the healthcare system at large and the healthcare professionals in
particular.
The designers, who were in our case Master’s level students involved
as external experts, bring along tools and skills for creative problem solving.
They first need to immerse themselves in the realities of the project
stakeholders in order to gain the insights for the creation of concepts that
benefit all of them.
In the context of the cases presented here, both healthcare personnel
and citizens can be users of the proposed IT service concepts. Therefore,
both groups are mutually referred to as users.
127 · Reducing social distance through co-design