CHRONIC ILLNESS
TRANSITION, YOUTH
COMMUNICATION DESIGN
DESIGN RESEARCH

YOUTH IN TRANSITION

“Children [...] are not necessarily well

equippe

d to make the transition from
child-centred to adult-centred health care.”

/ JONATHAN AITKEN

A 3RD YEAR COMMUNICATION DESIGN CLASS considered the problem of youth with chronic

illness transitioning from child-centred to adult-centred healthcare. Current systems have

focused on paper or web-based education and information recording, but compliance rates are

low. In conjunction with the British Columbia Children’s Hospital the class conducted primary

and secondary research and proposed solutions.

CONTEXT /

Children with chronic illnesses are well cared
for in British Columbia; they receive excellent
care at the British Columbia Children’s
Hospital (BCCH) in Vancouver. Children,
however, are not necessarily well equipped

to make the transition from child-centred to
adult-centred healthcare. As children, they
have access to many supportive environments;
adults are responsible for their care. As adults,
they are expected to manage this care on their
own—a task for which many have not been
adequately prepared. Various initiatives are

in place to ease this transition, but none are
completely satisfactory. Much of the materials
are print-based, with many charts and tables
that need to be completed by the youth. Some
of the materials seem designed for a younger
or older audience. None of it seems to “fit”
today’s 18 year old. Other initiatives are
online-based, but they too have had only partial
“buy-in” from youth. Representatives from the
BCCH approached me in the summer of 2011
with the goal of considering this problem from
a communication design perspective. I agreed
to offer it as a major research project for my
3rd year communication design class.

DESIGN PROBLEM /

The class was asked to consider the following
problem: using any of the tools and techniques
of design research discussed in this class

or others, consider solutions to the problem
described above. If you find that media
preferences are fundamentally different

between youth and their caregivers, what media
would you choose? To whom should your
design be directed? Are you leading the group
or following their preferences? If your research
suggests that youth engagement is the problem,
how could you change the design to effect that
engagement? In other words, how will you
ensure the “buy-in” from this demographic? This
complex problem has no single simple solution;
it has many conflicting perspectives and
requirements. Decide how you would proceed to
solve the problem.

METHODOLOGY /

Using a variety of techniques—primary and
secondary research; co-creation; human-centred
design; brainstorming; emotional probes;
demographics; etcetera—students considered
the problem. While access to youth with chronic
illness in transition was limited, students did
create co-creation toolkits and ethnographic
probes. These were used with a more general
population, so results will need testing and
further research, but the process itself is valid
and revealed many different possible design
directions. These included: gaming metaphors
in a web site to maximize usage and retention;
expansion of health self-care education to the
general population in high school; community-
focused websites that facilitate the creation of
support groups and communication with others
with similar issues; parent-centred education;
customizable iPad apps that facilitated self-care.
Two of these directions are outlined below by
student creators.