Multiple perspectives on the transition from hospital to home
A research and innovation project at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) and Center for Connected Care (C3), 2021
This project looks at the collaboration between several different actors through building a systemic understanding of service transitions while exploring how design methods can be shaped to support complex situations when different perspectives converge for one goal. The project context is the transition of healthcare services in Norway, from hospital and clinics to the homes of patients. Stakeholders included hospitals, municipalities and health technology companies.
Read more about this work here.
Role and responsibilities
I worked in a team of four designers as a design researcher. My tasks included scheduling interviews, creating interview guides, visual note taking and facilitating interviews, analysis and final visualisation of map, presenting work to stakeholder network.
Process
Step 1: Semi-structured interviews with stakeholders to understand how they experience and understand the transition
Step 2: Find suitable analysis model and analysing all interviews
Step 3: Transform the interviews and analysis into a macro-view map
Step 1: Interview with partners
Step 2: Finding analysis model
Vink & Koskela-Houtari’s framework proposes identifying the visible and invisible parts of a system support a better understanding of it, and strategising where to begin change processes. We used the model to analyse the interviews and shape the gigamap.
In the interviews, several participants shared how they have been building bridges between institutional silos. Therefore, we chose to represent the system as an archipelago where islands are interconnected with different types of bridges. Some bridges are broken, some are staircases or roads. The islands represent the different institutions. Under each island we have unpacked the regulative, normative and cultural cognitive aspects to capture the perspective of the actors. Each island has a thematic name capturing the essence of the island.
Step 3: Final representation of the system
This representation of the system transition is intentionally provocative to help generate a discussion around how partners can collaborate better to deliver the best care for patients. This brings the partners on the same page and supports in having guided discussions on what we should focus on.
Next steps: Using the system map to scope which services to work with to improve collaboration between partners
The process continued with the design team zooming into each island, and curating a meso level perspective along with relevant stakeholders which shed light on services which need to improve inter-institutional collaboration. After detailing the meso level, we moved forward by selecting a micro level perspective based on another round of interviews to further scope the research project with our stakeholders.
