Staging co-design processes for self-care technologies

Abstract

Many new healthcare technologies are currently being implemented in people's homes in order to facilitate self-care. Socially innovative design is challenging, since it requires an intimate understanding of people's abilities and daily practices. In this article, we highlight the need to perform field studies in people's homes and discuss how to stage design processes 'with' people who are actually going to use the self-care technologies – not only end-users, but also other actors, such as relatives, caregivers, and municipality and company staff. Specifically, we describe how challenges associated with inscribing self-care into healthcare technologies can be overcome by staging co-design processes.

Keywords

• Self-care
• staging design processes
• healthcare technologies
• co-design