Designing for wellbeing

Recognising and solving problems with public services and developing
concepts around them required the students to quickly learn the practices
and realities of the cities’ social work, healthcare, cultural activities and
urban planning tasks. The best way to achieve this was under the guidance
of professionals from these fields. For some of the partners, both the overall
concept of design and the process of guiding design students to the core
issues of the services appeared somewhat strange at first – what did design
have to do with, say, healthcare or social work? The following comments
illustrate the initials reactions from some of the partners.
“When I think of design, I primarily think of this industrial, well, design. I
definitely couldn’t imagine that they would do anything like this [developing
scheduling and customer communications], and I did ask ‘Say what?’
when I heard where the partners were coming from.”
– Nurse in an internal medicine clinic, Helsinki
“I did not know for a long time what this collaboration would entail… Then
I heard that earlier a similar kind of project had resulted in pieces of art.
I started wondering how child protection services could take part in this,
and how it could benefit us. In our everyday work we are under a lot of
pressure, and we always need to decide where to get involved.”
– Expert in family and social services, Espoo
The collaboration encountered a lot of valid concerns about regulations,
responsibilities and non-disclosure issues. In certain projects the interviewees
felt like the designers had more freedom than the medical personnel
and were following an entirely different set of rules. This caused
some confusion.
“In child protection services we are operating in an environment of norms
that is very strictly regulated by the law. We have strict practices with data
26 · The cities on design