Assistant Professor Amanda Lazar Published in Interactions
The piece is called “Co-design in Health: What Can we Learn from Art Therapy?”
Driven by calls for democratizing design and empowering patients, researchers are turning to methods that involve users more directly in the design process. Methods such as participatory design and co-design provide a way of engaging individuals in the hands-on creation of their own health technologies. However, some of the ways in which we practice co-design in health are at odds with what the approach aims to achieve. We focus on our own ideas of success, such as improved health outcomes, treatment, or adherence, when the emergent nature of co-design often takes us in entirely new directions. We expect that participants will tell us their health-related needs and generate ideas alongside us, but health is highly personal, and talking about it with others can be emotionally distressing. For individuals with difficulty verbalizing their own experiences, we ask others, such as proxies, to fill in for them, even though this minimizes the role of those with health conditions, whom we most hope to engage through co-design.
Read the full article here: https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2018/co-design-in-health