How might we make healthcare better?
Define a challenge. Listen to stories. Make something that creates value.
For our first approximation to Interaction Design we were thrown into a massive challenge: making healthcare better. The main objective was to get a first glimpse of what IxD was all about and to start familiarizing with the methods and tools. Because of this we had complete freedom to explore what was meant by healthcare and come up with a ‘how might we’ (design challenge) of our own.
Our starting point was that the wide availability of information nowadays is changing drastically the way people related to the healthcare system. Doctors are not the only reliable medical entity anymore, and it is hard to know what and who to trust.
After lots of twists and turns, and a complete change of topic, we ended up developing an easy vitamin d intake concept. Our project was about exploring ways in which medical guidance can be incorporated in a very natural way through activities that are already part of our daily schedules.
First things first: how can we define healthcare?
When we think healthcare the first connection we normally make is related to the either the governmental healthcare system policies or the way in which hospitals work. But how do people experience healthcare on a daily basis?
We set out to talk to as many people as we could. We talked to both people directly involved in the medical field and all sort of others who didn’t work in anything related but had a lot to say about health.
We heard stories of ambulance drivers complaining at the amount of time that they were not treating real emergencies because of how much elderly people called them and about doctors having to be on the lookout for old grannies who could be potential drug dealers.
We heard about how people didn’t trust doctors anymore and had to double check everything, have very special diets or even spiritual healing masters.
It seemed that we were looking we were looking at a healthcare system that seemed a little fragmented. Doctors who were not fully satisfied with what they were doing. People not holding them as the only valid or ultimate source of health information. And there seemed to be a rise of independent expertise communities.
We decided to focus on the elderly population.
They seemed to have the biggest potential of opportunities since they are the ones who have a harder time accessing traditional healthcare systems and also these new platforms and information.
So, we set out to work on it …
We wanted to understand what health meant for this population. And of course, we focused it on emotional health because one of the biggest problems they face is loneliness.
It seemed that we were looking we were looking at a healthcare system that seemed a little fragmented. Doctors who were not fully satisfied with what they were doing. People not holding them as the only valid or ultimate source of health information. And there seemed to be a rise of independent expertise communities.
With only a week left for the end of the project we decided to start all over and change our design challenge. We had hit a dead end. With this decision we didn’t want to imply in any way that working with the elderly people is not important ( in fact it is one the most important challenges of the future). We just realized that we hadn’t been paying attention.
Three major lessons that came out from this:
1. Our question was too broad and broad questions think lead to broad answers. What was particular to Estonia?
2. Why where caught trying to design high tech gadgets for the elderly? New tech is not always the best solution. People don’t need a new device. Keep it simple.
3. “By this point I don’t want to make new friends, and I’ve learned to manage myself”. We weren’t listening. The idea that loneliness was one of elders biggest problems had come from us. We were totally being guided by our own preconceptions.
We were trying to create one of these new empowered communities that we had seen at the beginning but then realized that maybe the bigger issue behind was trust.
Why are they sparking up? Wouldn’t it be better if instead of creating a new one we could get them to communicate? Or even better, find a common ground?
People are facing confusion in the jungle of opportunities information/misinformation — who to trust?
We went thinking about empowering communities to define health on their own terms to trying to find ways to integrate health into everybody’s day to day life, to find a common ground between communities.
Even though the idea is still in its very initial development stage, it was very exciting because we found an exciting path to think about healthcare and its future: how can we start thinking about health in a way that is integrated so normally in your life that information is widely available, and trust is no longer an issue?
Uncovering this theme/opportunity inside the medical field was no doubt very exciting. But probably what ended up being even better was discovering the potential of interaction design to help us see the bigger picture and be constantly on the lookout for how things feel and the ‘why’ behind them.
Through this project I learned, among many other things, that it is very important to be ok with being confused, that it is important to distance yourself from the project sometimes, that design principles are not static and change upon the values that you continually uncover, that brainstorming is most useful to uncover themes, that a nonjudgmental space is essential, that creating options is way more important than developing a single idea and that telling stories is probably the best way to get your point across.
