Prototype 2- Our take at putting ‘life’ into end of life care…
The main takeaway from our initial in-class crit session, in which everyone shared his or her thoughts using post-its, was that our solution, the one we covered in the previous post, was too informative and feels very cold. Our ‘conversation project kit’ did not feel personal, and touching, but rather, feels medical and distant. To put more life into our solution to solve the late referral issues, we thought was the core of the problem that could make the end of life care experience better, we initially thought of ways to make this more engaging to make people consider end of life thinking before it’s too late.
Finding ways to be more engaging and welcoming, we came across with a puzzle idea. A puzzle idea is that a patient and family members can spend time together to write down(we assumed that writing about death is an easier way to start thinking about death) their wishes to come to quality of life, and understand from each other’s perspective. Our focus intention was to talk about death in the means of celebrating life; we wanted people to talk about their past experiences with each other to talk about their future goals they might have before the end of life. Knowing the goals will eventually lead to the thought about preparing the end of life.
Our assumption was that acknowledging wishes for the remainder of the life will result in acceptance of death and people will start to prepare for their end of life care. With this in mind, we diagramed out the specific steps that might help people to start thinking about end of life care.
Our initial plan was to focus on accomplishing a goal that a patient came up with family members. This puzzle idea was a multiple used artifact, that should be used over time. We divided the puzzle into largely 3 sections, the past, the present, and the future. The first section is to celebrate the past(We imagined people could put their old photos and talk about their valuable memories). The second section is to celebrate the present. This is the part where the patient and the family members get together to come up with their wishes and goals toward the patient’s end of life and understand each other’s perspective. The third section is to celebrate the future. Both patient and family members can try to accomplish the goals they created together and have quality of life. We tried to put some end of life thinking and knowledge embedded within the puzzle so that people can keep thinking about this topic.
At our 2nd take, we focused more on the placement of each activities that both a patient and family members can follow to achieve their end of life goals. We tried to make this a collaborative tool that they can do and spend memorable time together. We also wanted this puzzle to be a collage, when they finish, of their memorable time and keep it as an artifact to celebrate what they have accomplished.
Our Solution
Takeaway from In-class Crit
The main take away from the crit was we did not think about the context of where our solution will going to be placed. We imagined this to be a collaborative artifact, but did not consider where our solution will live in the context of home. This is a pretty large artifact, the size of a regular poster, but we haven’t spent much time on where and how this solution will be placed.
Also, we did not even consider whether patient and family members are ok with sharing or putting this large artifact of private and sensitive topic in the relatively more public space(living room).
The crucial feedback was this puzzle idea still lacked buy-in from a patient and lacked emotional/personal aspect. A patient and family members have no reason to do activities that we planned for them. Our idea still felt too cold and too informative. We tried to explicitly convey our message, which may deter people from using our product. We learnt a very important lesson with this idea. A true buy-in from a person can only come after that person’s determination and acceptance.
