“Experiential care”, hyper-responsibility or hyper-personalization?

7 min readJul 15, 2020

“Experiential care”, hyper-responsibility or hyper-personalization?

“Being in the field of care, I put my expertise aside by repeating to myself one of the quotes from the ‘suspensory’ at the beginning of the visit: “I know I don’t know. This helped me a lot to deconstruct my vision in order to listen and build with the other members of my group. I was apprehensive about my ability to understand the method. In the end it was very fluid and the facilitator immediately gave us confidence and allowed us to surpass ourselves.”

- Marie Lechat, nurse

“It scared me to be confronted with a time limit, and then we were moving forward together in a natural way, and even the final rendering was something worked out, accomplished, which is satisfying. It’s really amazing, I was bluffed! Looking at the other band’s sketch, I said to myself that they had been thinking about it for a month! And then, without knowing each other, to be able to feel so comfortable so quickly and to let go, for a final rendering worked out, accomplished, it’s very satisfying.”

- Laurence, Cosmetics Marketing

For this 7th creative expedition, we have chosen to talk about care and well-treatment, redefining what is a caretaker and a carer, to bring back beauty, joy and life into care.

Connected health, personalized beauty, hospitality label? Patient-centricity? Clean or Green beauty? Asian medicine, holistic therapies, yogic philosophy?

Because the Health, Beauty, Well-being sector needs new experience scenarios, double-empathy, and choreographers to reconcile increasingly pressing economic issues, and increasingly sensitive individual experiential expectations, together with the Scenary community, we have invented the experiential formats and content of tomorrow.

According to the CNRTL, care corresponds to the attachment, interest, effort, priority of treatment that one gives to a person, an object, a situation, a project or a task. It is therefore an embodied intention, or an acting responsibility, to care. We also discover that the responsibility for this care can be either self-determined (taking care of oneself, eating well) or delegated (in the case for example where one turns to a care professional, or to a treatment from one’s entourage).

What strikes you at first sight when you study the lexical field of health care is that all the terms that define it in its general meaning seem to be uncorrelated with the lexical field of the health professional: intimacy, generosity, hyper-personality, benevolence, benevolence, well-treatment, listening, welcome, hospitality, self-knowledge …

Classic Care vs. Experiential Care

Once this definition, which allows us to consider care as an active watch on others or on oneself, was established, we wondered about the type of individuals who practiced or benefited from this care, and in what context? For indeed, two visions of the responsibility to care or to heal are opposed:

Classical care, here is a first vision in which patients and carers interact and in which the value proposition of the carer towards the patient can then be characterized by this exchange: “Suddenly you are not well” → “Thanks to me, you will get better”. In this case, the carer’s responsibility seems then technical, dotted lines, with a dilution of this responsibility. Indeed, the responsibility appears only in case of a problem of the patient.
Experiential care, another vision that will be characterized as experiential emerges. The value proposition is then conjugated in the first person in the exchange with the well-treated: “I am well” → “I am helped to keep getting better”, or “I am well or not so well → I am helped to keep getting better and to avoid worries”.

Well-Treated patients and cuarers (cure+care)

In discussing experiential care, we were keen to redefine the roles of caregivers, doctors, physicians, and also the cared-for, sick, patients and to rename them. Some attempts to modify the language had already taken place, notably thanks to Dr Jean-François Thebaut who had proposed to introduce the term ‘activate’, the patient as the actor of his health (1). In our case, we wanted two generic terms that could group together the whole ecosystem of health actors and their patients.

Well-Treated patients and cuarers. What if we established a dual responsibility between well-treaters and well-treated people, based on double empathy and an ongoing joint responsibility?

But who exactly are these actors of the well-treated?

Beauty Laboratories & Brands: they research, analyse, create products, etc.
Health establishments (hospital, clinic, town doctor): they diagnose, measure, operate, provide care, accompany, train, research, create, and provide support to patients.
Samu, Firefighters: rescue, respond to emergency, transport
Territories and towns (town hall, school, social assistance, therapeutic education centre): they raise awareness, provide assistance, warn, propose care pathways, warn

and so on

Quite quickly, the “Experiential Care” approach brings out new needs that need to be addressed: listening to oneself, learning to listen to oneself, identifying intuitions, getting to know oneself, keeping in shape, connecting the body and touch, listening to those around you, practicing well-being, creating links, knowing one’s health capital, one’s health assets, reducing the mental and operational burden on doctors, giving educational tools to patients, improving the caring experience…

Why are the economic stakes more and more pressing, in parallel with increasingly sensitive individual experiential expectations? But why are these needs so little covered by current care offers?

The well-treated carer, author and director of care?

One of the fundamental shortcomings of the classical approach to care can be analysed by a split between the authors and the directors of care on the one hand. One of the important concepts of experiential design is that of “mise en corps”, or bringing to life. Indeed, research in experimental design shows that it is not enough to want to transmit a message to a receiver to make him/her understand this message and that we cannot decorate the conception of these messages from their being brought to life. To think of well-treatment as an experience designer would be to consider the well-treated as part of a life/body implementation of the proposed care experience.

A typology of experiential care that favours this living, double empathy or care scenario is evidenced by a typology of experiential care that favours this living, double empathy or care scenario:

By using a vocabulary, lexical field or analogies that make the well-treated autonomous in their care experience, both in terms of buying prescriptions, we can cite Help, a patient-oriented empathic drug packaging, the name of the drug or its composition replaced by the symptom, for example: “I have aching body”, and in terms of compliance with prescriptions, we can mention Inmbox, a packaging that facilitates the daily taking of medication.
By promoting the knowledge and appropriation of one’s own body with, in particular, the project Les parleuses (2) in which the uterus is tangibilized, manipulable, as an element of mediation to communicate on an unthought or workshops for modeling vulva in modeling clay.
Imagining products/tools that help the well-treated to define their own care experience with for example Dodow (3), when a team of insomniacs co-create their sleep experience.
By helping to consent to an experience of care by communicating all the stages of the journey, as on the app to understand the experience of an MRI as with Radioheroes (4)
Putting the well-treatments in the skin of a patient to help them to develop well-treatment thanks to an Escape room (5)
By promoting the link to others and to touch, particularly through calinotherapy or sexuality of the disabled (6)

“A good experience is better than a long speech”, so without further ado, here are the answers to the 2 challenges proposed that day to Scenary, the experience design community.

Let’s make life better for the well-treated!

- Wellness, a story of ordinary well-treatment in a not so ordinary hospital

In this hospital, the patient is no longer taken care of, but taken care of! As a well-treated person, he.she.becomes the main actor in his care. No jargon, as soon as he arrives a dedicated person explains to him in simple terms and with kindness, what he is suffering from and how the well-treaters will take into account his whole person (mind, body and heart). No more endless waiting in the corridors, he.she can manage his personal agenda hour by hour! A cook-nutritionist offers her a menu adapted to her pathology, the socio-dermatologist listens to her needs, transmits the right gestures to her and addresses her concerns. During her free time, she can practice “well-being” workshops (yoga, hairdressing, acupuncture, …).

Let’s improve the experience of the well-treaters!

-The Golden Hand, the festival of well-treatment

It is a festival to reward beauticians who have a high vision of their profession. This weekend is organized by a cooperative of beauticians in partnership with their favorite brands! Spa moments, to allow them to be well treated, co-development workshops to train themselves, stand-ups of testimonials to celebrate the best moments of aesthetics… it’s also an opportunity to feast, to meet, and to celebrate the “Golden Hand”, the happy.winner of the Esty Awards.