Designing for wellbeing

child’s point of view in a new way, or think about things like a child. That
kick-started some pretty quick brainstorming about what we could do
together to further that goal.”
– Expert in family and social services, Espoo
Especially in healthcare, there were initial concerns about whether or not
the designers would be able to understand the everyday routine of the
field in such fast-paced projects, but there were positive surprises in store.
“When the schedule was revealed, it was really strict, and I was pretty
sceptical. I didn’t really know what to expect, so I adopted a ‘let’s see what
happens’ attitude. When the first process proposals were on the table, I was
simply thinking, ‘Goodness, how have they been able to understand our
workflow this well in this little time?’… The schedules were adhered to well
– when we agreed on a one-hour meeting at a given time, one hour it was.”
– Head of department in an internal medicine clinic, Helsinki
For those who were used to the tight norms of child protection services,
adopting the designers’ open and creative method of working took a while,
but talking helps – even when working with designers.
“Our development processes can be open and unstructured at times, but
maybe not this unstructured. When the starting point is that people get
into a creative process based on some stimulus, we can’t go and say ‘be
creative like this’ or define the end results. Maybe that was a little bit scary
in the beginning, but that too faded away. It was possible to talk about these
feelings at any time. The success of a co-operation requires being able to
say during the process that something makes you nervous, suspicious or
scared. Here, it worked well.”
– Architect, social services, Espoo
28 · The cities on design