Co‐designing for communications and services in the healthcare environment
| Pages | 42-47 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/17465729200500030 |
| Date | 01 December 2005 |
| Published date | 01 December 2005 |
| Author | Deborah Szebeko |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care |
Deborah Szebeko
Director
thinkpublic
Correspondence to:
Deborah Szebeko
thinkpublic
Studio One
Hoxton Works
128 Hoxton Street
London N1 2SF
Deborah@thinkpublic.com
www.thinkpublic.com
OPINION
42 journal of public mental health
vol 4 • issue 4
© Pavilion Publishing (Brighton) Ltd
It is official. The NHS Modernisation Agency has
recognised that sensitive graphic design can be a
valuable tool in helping to develop services. Its
report Designs on Health (NHS Modernisation
Agency, 2005) documents the similarities and
synergies between graphic designers’ approaches to their
work and those of health practitioners. Designs on
Health lays down a challenge: that of establishing more
productive partnerships between the two worlds of
healthcare and graphic design, and thereby marks the
first major step of a journey that should embed creative
design thinking within the NHS.
Design, in the words of Mitchell Kapor (Kapor,
1996), requires one to ‘stand with a foot in two worlds –
the world of technology and the world of people and
human purposes’. The trick is to marry the two together.
For this reason designers can make good facilitators:
they are used to occupying the middle ground where
different ideas, disciplines and interest groups must meet
and communicate. Effective designers have a flair for
planning for the future in a variety of ways. They can,
for example, anticipate trends in individuals’ changing
needs by using form, order, contour and relationship in
order to understand and represent those needs, and
thereby both expand how we think about what those
needs are and how the physical and social world can be
adapted to meet them.
That said, it is easy to understand why many in the
NHS might find some of the implications of design
challenging. The solutions designers might propose are
based on different concepts and a different evidence
base from those traditionally used by NHS clinicians
and managers. But, in a sense, that is their strength:
many of the benefits I and others like me hope to bring
to the healthcare environment arise from the emotional
impact of good design, and research has traditionally not
been successful at capturing emotional impact. But I
would argue that people do recognise good design when
they encounter it, even if articulating its impact might
be hard.
Similarly, designers must often trust what we might
call our sixth sense when finding solutions. As Charles
Owen of the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of
Technology has argued, design thinking is characterised
by its insight and is particularly valuable when responding
to complex problems that require a style of thinking that
can range freely (Owen, 2005). We are now at the stage
where researchers and evaluators are devoting more time
to gauging the emotional impact of interventions, and
this should herald an increased appreciation of the diverse
effects that good design can have.
Communication and design
thinkpublic is a health-focused service design and
communication agency that believes a patient-centered
NHS must not just be a slogan: it must be a way of life.
Our service design and communication consultancy
aims to support NHS services to:
Co-designing for
communications and services
in the healthcare
environment
Graphic design – the accessible visual presentation of information and materials – has an invaluable
role in communicating health messages that has yet to be fully appreciated by the NHS,asserts
Deborah Szebeko. In this article she describes two health-related projects where design for
communication has played a central role: a community development project to promote healthy
eating in an area of high deprivation, and a web-based system for patients to map their emotional
journeys alongside their care pathways and contribute feedback that can be used to improve service
planning and delivery.
Key words:
graphic design
healthcare
communication
healthy eating
patient journey
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