Embodied Making and Learning
Experience Labs: co-creating health and care innovations using design tools and artefacts
Tara French, Gemma Teal, Sneha Raman
The Glasgow School of Art
t.french@gsa.ac.uk
Keywords: participatory; healthcare; creativity; material artefacts
Abstract
For healthcare innovations to be successful, the voices of those receiving or delivering such innovations need to be heard much earlier in the design process. This is not easy as there are likely to be multiple stakeholders involved, and their different backgrounds make it difficult to challenge or evaluate potential innovation in the early stage of development. This paper positions the Experience Lab as a means of co-creating sustainable, innovative solutions to healthcare challenges. The Experience Lab offers participants, both receiving and delivering healthcare, the opportunity to engage in the design process, share insights, experience new concepts and imagine new ways of responding to challenges. The material artefacts and bespoke tools provide the conditions through which to create new meanings and shared experiences. This paper presents the Experience Lab approach, artefacts and tools, providing examples of these in context. The paper concludes with the need for further research to understand the role of artefacts and tools in supporting detail design and implementation beyond the Lab, and the potential of the Lab approach for other contexts.
This paper is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.
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Cite this paper: French. T., Teal, G., Raman, S. (2016). Experience Labs: co-creating health and care innovations using design tools and artefacts. Proceedings of DRS 2016, Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference. Brighton, UK, 27–30 June 2016.
This paper will be presented at DRS2016, find it in the conference programme