Conference Agenda

Intellectual disability (ID) affects approximately 1% of the global population, repre-senting diverse support needs. Sheltered workshops in Hong Kong, as elsewhere, aim to maximise the potential of individuals with ID (trainees), acknowledging their equal rights to be full members of the community, though their needs are often overlooked in design research, and space constraints pose developmental challeng-es. This study conducts case analyses of sheltered workshops in Hong Kong and globally, focusing on spatial layouts, interior design, and developmental goals. User personas provide insights into the experiences of trainees and supervisors. This re-search proposes a comprehensive framework featuring 3 aspects that contain 13 critical design variables for designing inclusive interior environments for sheltered workshops, emphasizing mixed-use spaces and adaptable furniture for flexible utili-ty in confined spaces. This framework guides the creation of inclusive, supportive environments for shelter workshops that respect and harness the unique abilities of trainees with special needs.

Increasingly, there is a shift toward bringing services that were originally provided in hospitals into the home. Healthcare designers have been supporting this movement by designing medical devices and home care services. However, there is a risk that such shifts simply medicalize the home and erode the valuable informal practices of care that already occur there. Using a research through design approach, we adopted a hospitality lens to understand the rituals of hosting at home and identify potential areas of hostility as mental health consultations enter the home in Norway. This research demonstrates the value of adopting a hospitality lens when designing healthcare at home and how mapping rituals can contribute to a reflexive practice for both healthcare designers and clinicians.

To foster a culture of inclusive care and patients-centred solutions in the healthcare sector, being able to assess the inclusivity of services is an essential step for enhancing the design and improvement of services. What are the key indicators of inclusive service design in the healthcare sector? Based on insights from the field of the built environment, a thematic analysis of the literature on service design in the context of healthcare, psychology, and public service design is conducted. Indicators extracted from the literature are structured into four categories: physical, sensorial, cognitive, and psycho-social, and according to two phases: service design and delivery. The resulting indicators, in conjunction with indicators from the EU Accessibility Act, can be utilized by designers as a comprehensive source of aspects for designing novel and existing services, and by scholars as a catalogue of indicators for evidence-based inclusive design to reimagine the healthcare sector.

Simulated nature has been widely implemented to healthcare settings to create spaces that promote positive emotional responses and support overall health and wellbeing. The notion of indirect experience refers to the integration of natural elements into the design of built environments to allow occupants to experience nature indirectly. However, the question of whether simulated nature are satisfactory substitutes for actual nature has hardly been addressed. In this study, we examined whether the outcomes of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) enhanced when it was carried out in simulated nature as opposed to actual one. Two focus groups provided information about participants’ experiences of MBSR in both types of exposures. We found that both nature settings boosted MBSR outcomes. However, the actual nature resulted in greater increases in nature connectedness compared to the simulated nature. These findings demonstrate the potential value of both simulated and actual nature as settings for enhancing healthcare delivery.

Designers of enabling technologies need a deep understanding of what patients want and need. But prototypes with working sensors and actuators may be far outside the experience of the vulnerable populations (e.g., older patients) targeted and may prove harmful to them, requiring a more cautious, “step-by-step” design approach. We report on how designers gain feedback from, before older patients, clinicians, using low-fidelity, full-scale prototypes without electronics to anticipate how such patients will interact with full-functioning technologies. Three hypothetical patient-personas with varying degrees of injuries were developed with clinicians. Clinicians then offered feedback on the assistance needed from our assistive robotic furniture by their patients to complete tasks at home to maintain independence. This design step was quick and effective in gaining meaningful feedback from clinicians who can speak for a wide range of patients in anticipation of studying interactions with older patients in a step-by-step process of design.

When facing serious illnesses, patients and their caregivers encounter complex decisions throughout the care journey. Assisting in these decision-making pro-cesses has been a longstanding topic in palliative medicine, however, healthcare providers still face challenges in practice. Design contributions to healthcare have emerged in recent years. This overview focuses on the past decades’ litera-ture reviews in healthcare and design fields, examining interventions that foster communication and enhance informed decision-making in palliative care (PC), and investigating the design impacts in this context. This review of reviews uses thematic analysis to identify future opportunities for collaboration between de-sign and healthcare researchers to develop innovative interventions that address these issues in PC. The following themes were discussed: recommended practic-es, moments of conversation and caregiving, the dearth of design work, dissemi-nation, and implementation barriers. Findings urge more collaborations and bal-anced contributions from healthcare and design researchers in designing patient decision-making aids in PC.

The experience-based design (EBD) approach captures, measures, and improves user experience across their journey, aiming to establish efficient and friendly healthcare systems. In this study, the goal is to propose improvements for an outpatient oncology service through EBD. Methodologically, it involves a project-based EBD approach, rooted in co-design. Its implementation comprised data collection at two stages: (i) user journey’s mapping, and (ii) a codesign workshop with users. From the data analysis, we created a journey map describing users' interactions with the service, measured their experience and identified the critical points. For these points, a co-created solution was devised with the intention of enhancing the user experience within the service. We describe this solution as the "Navigation Program" and discuss how it facilitated the customization of the service’s user’s journey, leading to an improved overall experience. Our research addresses the gap in studies related to oncology services in developing countries.