Designing for wellbeing

The students approached the discipline of psychiatric care with little
prior understanding. The little information they had gathered served as
background and a source for developing initial questions to pose on the first
ward visits. The loose analysis of the initial data gathered on this excursion
allowed a lot of room for opinions and feelings, but more importantly for
searching for openings where design could best intervene. The students
state that the key words and phrases used to guide their direction in the
project were chosen through discussion rather than in-depth analysis of the
findings, and thus these choices were based on a subjective interpretation
of the perceived phenomenon and reflection on prior experience. Rather
than making things easier for them, this only served to open up more
avenues for deeper investigation and the formulation of new questions.
However, it was after the first visit that the group identified an area where
they could contribute to the improvement of psychiatric care – the patient
transfer process. This illustrates how the design process simultaneously
adds to the knowledge of the context in question and enables focusing
and narrowing towards a solution.
The student group identified the need to involve the most relevant stakeholders
in the project. This contributed to their confidence and enabled the
project to move forward and generate results with real impact. To this end, the
group engaged care personnel and ex-patient representatives in semi-structured
interviews and a sketching workshop. Sketching enabled the required
data to be gathered quickly, easily and holistically. The technique uses the
representatives’ sketching for knowledge production in place of structured
discussions, which are more cumbersome and time consuming to distil into
concrete findings. Here, the structures laid out by the user-centred methods
play an important role as they provide a loose procedure and some theoretical
framing to reflect the data against. The user-centred methodology and its
application in the research phase of the project does not, however, impose
rules for the development of solutions. The collaboration also involved
mutual ideation, as questions about the system and the sketches could be
46 · We have always been here before: on design courting real disciplines