Workshop: Wellness Experience Research

Description

Instructor

Judith Gregory

The Fall 2009 Wellness Experience Research Workshop Fall 2009 will collaborate with the Chicago Hispanic Health Coalition in 'rethinking' community health models and understanding from perpectives of households, neighborhoods, multi-sectoral approach with experiential user research with multiple generations and inter-generationally towards the wellness and health issues of our times. ID students will engage in participatory user research with CHHC as a research partner for access to community participants, as well as secondary research on key trends and design ideation.

RETHINKING HEALTH AT THE INSTITUTE OF DESIGN

The Wellness Experience Research Workshop is an ongoing project that began as part of ID's Rethinking Health initiative that began with a generous personal gift from Robert Pew, Chairman of the Board, Steelcase Corporation, for the start-up phase 2007-2008.

RESEARCH AND LEARNING OBJECTIVES: Students will carry out:
- User-centered research in one or more Chicago neighborhoods
- Strategic analysis (secondary research) of key trends: (a) the surge in community clinics including retail and other ambient supports to well-being and health; (b) uses of social media to support positive change in health and promote sustainable well-beiing; (c) innovative wellness programs; and (d) personally-controlled health records that enhance health knowledge.
- Iterative prototyping of the research methods toolkit for understanding people's wellness and health activities in everyday life and health narratives;
- Use of GUAPOVIDEO, a video analysis tool for designers from LimeChile Productions (Chris Conley & Jed Wood, developers), for analysis of rich experiential data.
- Ideation for development of design criteria and concepts;
- Compelling visualization of research results and design concepts;
- Presentation to the research partners.

PROJECT PARTNERS
- CHICAGO HISPANIC HEALTH COALITION and PROJECT SOL (Study of Latinos) that have community health research efforts to address diabetes and cardiac diseases in Chicago.
- OREGON MEDICAL LABORATORIES which has a transformational approach to wellness to bringing state-of-the-art biomedical knowledge into people's everyday lives; and
- DOSSIA, a multi-employer consortium leading an innovative technology platform that enables online personally-controlled health records for employees of the DOSSIA corporate founders (Pitney-Bowes, Wal-Mart, Intel, AT&T, BP-USA, Cardinal Health).

PROJECT AIMS, OBJECTIVES & ANTICIPATED RESULTS
The workshop team will generate insights and design concepts grounded in people's lived experiences and oriented towards 'sustainable well-being' - 'how we can be more active in achieving wellness throughout our lives' and 'how healthcare can be better.' From the basis in design thinking and human-centered research, the results will complement and potentially augment high-level health models through close attention to social interactions, the influence of cultural values, and affordances of various media for health awareness learning.

BACKGROUND TO WORKSHOP THEMES
The Wellness Experience Research focuses on: individuals and families, caregivers in the clinic and at home, communities and populations. People's experiences are understood in their interactions with the institutional stakeholder groups: employers, health providers, payers and health plans, suppliers and government (see Systems Workshop, Charles Owen and John Pipino, August 2007, regarding these five stakeholder groups). The themes of the Human-centered Healthcare Design Research Workshop concern wellness, lifestyle and preventive health approaches in relation to the role of health information and informational technologies that promote health literacy regarding health risks and knowledge for self-management of individuals and families throughout their lives and in their interactions within the context of the US healthcare system. People's activities and practices will be related to broader models for lifelong wellness, biomedical knowledge, community health, preventive health concepts, curative modes of care for people living with chronic illness, and social and cultural influences on health knowledge of individuals and families.