Let’s start Designing for Care

I am inviting an inner circle of real-world experienced designers (and professionals and administrators) to review and advise the course of this book, Designing for Care. Interested and interesting people can register on the book’s community site at designforcare.com.

Healthcare is a sector of complex interconnected systems. If we act only on the parts to which we have access and personal knowledge, we may interfere with or fail to account for other parts of the system. Therefore, the concept of this vertical book on healthcare design is to build bridges across the related systems, roles, and structures in healthcare.

We hope to enable dialogue between designing for patient experiences, consumer health information, institutional experiences, and professional practice. I believe they are all interrelated, and the prepared designer will be more effective when they understand the problems, solutions, and methods in the realms of care experience they have not (yet) touched.

Our design perspectives and methods must become collaborative, not only within our teams, but across health disciplines. In fact, information design and experience design and research must become accepted healthcare disciplines. We should be invited to participate on the teams considered responsible for care.

While design professionals have helped humanize in many positive ways, most designers are not researchers, and vice-versa. We need to blur this distinction in practice. Whether we consider it user research, innovation research, or practice research, a core purpose of the book is to strengthen your ability to perform as skillful designers by better understanding the range of design thinking and practice across healthcare. A tall order in a short volume, indeed.

Care enough to join us? Contact us, or visit the book community site at designforcare.com and share a story or successful method.