Designing for wellbeing

group was asked to design a self-service health data portal for Neuvola’s
online service in the city of Helsinki. The desire was to free up time from
staff’s busy schedules by eliminating a few face-to-face appointments
that were just routine check-ups. The idea was to let mothers take care of
them themselves through the online reporting of self-measurements such
as body measurements and taking urine samples for testing. In addition,
Helsinki Health Care Centre asked for conceptual input into the Neuvola
appointment booking process to improve the productivity of the personnel
managing appointments. Again, the aim was to give the task to the clients
themselves by providing them with the means to book and manage their
own appointments online. The brief allowed for both self-serve services
to be integrated into the same portal.
The design students 5 explored the realities of a maternity and childcare
clinic by interviewing several parents about their experiences and
expectations. It turned out that the value of the Neuvola service to mothers
was not only in the routine check-ups, which were the prime candidate
for self-administration, but, more importantly, in the face-to-face contact
with Neuvola staff. This gave mothers the opportunity to share their concerns
and get answers to the questions they were facing. The latter was
perceived as a crucial element of the service that the mothers were not
prepared to forgo. Therefore, despite the administration’s perception of
service improvements by offloading routine tasks to mothers and making
staff more available for other consultations, mothers viewed the reduction
in face-to-face appointments as a deterioration of the service. Given that
most mothers already felt overwhelmed with the amount of information
and tasks they were facing, it became clear that assisting mothers and their
families in digesting all the information and managing all their tasks and
appointments, while improving the communication between the clinic, the
clients and their support network, was the direction to go.
5 Group “Neuvola”: Rahul Abhisek, Jung-Youn Ko and Pihla Mäkinen.
134 · Reducing social distance through co-design