Designing for wellbeing

designers the information they needed to create more considered, comprehensive
and human-centred solutions.
Nine Master’s programme students participated in an eight-week project,
Co-designing the Future of Health IT, 2 to solve three specific real-world
challenges. The project involved administrative staff from the HHCC central
organisation and healthcare units, healthcare personnel including doctors,
nurses and office staff at the clinics, and Helsinki citizens. Given the twomonth
time constraint from brief to final concepts, the co-design approach
had a strong focus on design from an “expert perspective” 3 with the users
as the subject of the designers’ study. However, we also included participatory
elements, where healthcare personnel and citizens participated in
the design work. The designers and HHCC staff met approximately every
two weeks for interviews, evaluation of ideas and co-design workshops.
In addition, the designers engaged in field observations, the analysis of
artefacts and literature research. The groups also recruited citizens to be
interviewed and surveyed.
No-shows – rethinking the system approach
Patients who do not keep their appointments without previous cancellation
are a burden to the resources of public healthcare. Valuable care time
gets lost and the treatment of others is unnecessarily delayed. Our initial
assignment from HHCC asked for the design of an IT-based solution that
would reduce the number of no-show appointments. The introduction of
an SMS reminder functionality in the electronic patient database made it
possible for the healthcare centre to send reminder messages to patients.
However, designers were needed to shape such messages. The brief further
specified that a desirable concept should take into account the contexts of
2 Under the coordination of the HHCC management, supervised by professors Sampsa
Hyysalo and Jack Whalen and supported by researchers from Aalto University.
3 Sanders EBN & Stappers PJ. (2008): Co-creation and the new landscapes of design,
CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts, 4:1, 5-18.
131 · Reducing social distance through co-design