Job description
This fully-funded, 4-year PhD position aims to move towards a longitudinal view of end-users in the context of personalized healthcare technology through meta-design.
The notion of temporality is gaining increasing importance in the field of healthcare design. For example, by acknowledging the changing needs of individuals as they progress through ageing and bodily decline, impacting not only themselves, but also their (support) environment (Foong 2016). In these contexts, where change of end-user needs is a given, developing technology on the basis of a static end-user model makes little sense.
Meta-design has been proposed as a conceptual framework for designing flexible systems that can adapt, or be adapted to the changing needs of end-users even after these systems have entered their 'use-phase' (Fischer 2010). Meta-design promotes the idea of 'underdesign', or 'design for designers', emphasizing on the notion that designers should not aim to deliver finished, closed systems to their end-users, but rather open-ended systems that allow end-users or 'end-user designers' to adapt or expand systems as their needs develop.
Despite meta-design being grounded in the assumption that 'future uses and problems cannot be completely anticipated at design time' (Fischer 2010), the framework has yet to acquire traction in the field of healthcare design. One reason for that might be that meta-design does not provide an explicit vision of who the end-user actually is, it just assumes there are end-users whose needs and desires regarding a system will eventually change. It does not explicate how (meta-)designers could or should engage in the process of identifying and characterizing these end-users. As such, it does also not support explicating in what ways end-users' needs might change over time. Without intimate knowledge of e.g., patients, caregivers, care paths, transitions that patients go through, etc., (meta‑)designers will be unable to design systems that properly anticipate on emerging future care needs.
At the same time, in professional practice there is a lot of in-depth, longitudinal knowledge about patients and caregivers. Also, adaptation of healthcare technology is commonplace in practice already, such as the creation and adaptation of assistive technology by non-professionals (Hook et al. 2014). Still, such adaptations are hardly ever envisioned nor supported by the original designers of these technologies, and become especially challenging to conduct by non-professional designers in the context of interactive technology (Tetteroo et al. 2015).
In short: there is a disconnect between theory and practice regarding the design of personalized healthcare technologies. Meta-design provides a framework to address the issue of changing end-user needs from a system perspective, but needs to be extended to incorporate a longitudinal view from an end user perspective.
This PhD project aims to expand meta-design theory with a nuanced, temporal perspective on end users as to make it fit for application in the context of personalized healthcare technology. Specifically, in this project you will conduct an ethnographic study amongst stakeholders involved in two care pathways with different temporal perspectives (towards recovery & towards increased need for care). The data collected through this study will be analyzed and synthesized into a format that supports (meta‑)designers in incorporating the temporal aspects of end-users in their design processes. Finally, the expanded meta-design framework will be applied to a case study in the design and evaluation of a personalized healthcare technology for longitudinal use.