Designing for wellbeing

Throughout our project, it turned out that the IT tools are often developed
on a somewhat abstract administrative system level, which by nature
is not able to fully accommodate the human side of healthcare in practice.
This refers to both the perspective of front-line healthcare personnel, who
serve as the interface between the healthcare system and citizens, as well
as the perspective of citizens on the receiving end of healthcare. Therefore,
we need to pay attention to the multi-dimensional social distances that
designers face in public healthcare. These include the following (Figure 1):
The designer-user distance. Designers need to gain insight into the
realities of both user groups, namely the clients as well as the healthcare
personnel. This social distance affects designers’ capability to provide
solutions that suit the needs of all users. 1
The system-user distance with IT systems, which are developed from an
administrative perspective. An estrangement from the needs of the users
(both healthcare personnel and citizens) manifests itself in a mismatch
between the tools and the practices in place versus the realities of daily
work in each healthcare unit.
The alienation of healthcare personnel and citizens through system-imposed
approaches. By default, these two groups of users have a fair amount
of proximity as their mutual interaction is mainly based on face-to-face
unmediated contact dealing with the client’s health. However, the system-imposed
procedures and style of communication may restrict personnel
from applying their intimate insights to the situations at hand and
can as a result alienate patients.
Our approach to overcoming the social distances and turning them into
assets instead of constraints was to bring all the stakeholders’ viewpoints
together. Collecting the key actors’ points of view and expertise gave the
1 This distance is akin to the “developer-user social distance” described in Johnson, M. and
Hyysalo, S. (2012): Lessons for participatory designers of social media: long-term user
involvement strategies in industry. In: Proceedings of the 12th Participatory Design Conference:
Research Papers - Volume 1. DOI: 10.1145/2347635.2347646.
129 · Reducing social distance through co-design