SOCIABILITY

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Practice-based research figures prominently in terms of the meth-
odologies that you're bringing to the University under this umbrella
of the Health Design Lab. What kind of inputs, if | was going to work
with you, would | need to bring to the relationship and what might |
expect in terms of outputs, what would be the range there?

What we ask partners to bring is enthusiasm and participation. The best
partners come with a really interesting problem that they're passion-
ate about. Vancouver Coastal Health has been a terrific supporter for
several years; they engage with problems enthusiastically and openly,
and look to Emily Carr as an agent of change. In one recent project, they
asked us to look at the problem space of improving lift use compliance
in Residential Care facilities to reduce workplace injuries. In another,
they looked to us to provide insight into communication problems
between oncoming and offgoing nursing shifts. In both cases, the
problems are well defined, but the causes are complex and difficult to
ascertain. As well, they bring us people, often up to 20 to 30 participants
for several sessions. In a project we're working on now, they called me
and asked “what’s the maximum number of people we can send?” And
that’s a brand new problem for me because usually all we can get is 10 or
15 people. They had to cap it at 30 because they had more people than
that wanting to take part.

That sounds very exciting and full in terms of a partnership. What is
different or similar to your understanding of design thinking and the
thinking that the partner brings to the collaboration.

By bringing the partner and the designer into the same shared space not
only does the designer gain a much richer understanding of that prob-
lem space; it also provides the end users or the participants, the people
who will be engaging with the solution, a role in forming that solution.
So now we've become designers of strategy and process, enabling these
participants to become designers themselves. It ends up with a much
richer, more rounded solution to a problem. We bring multiple perspec-

tives to that problem, giving them a range of things to think about that
they never would’ve encountered on their own. A great example of that
was the hand hygiene project where the partner came to us looking to
simply boost compliance rates for hand sterilization from visitors to hos-
pital. They had tried to resolve this problem with posters and sanitation
dispensers positioned at as many locations as they could, but they pla-
teaued. So our students came up with a range of different solutions, one
of them a really simple device, which for every click of a hand dispenser
gave a funny blooping noise, put an image of a hand on a large monitor
and then that hand became part of a larger graphic. People were lining
up to do this! That kind of thinking is not something that a hospital can
do, it’s not their expertise, but we can as designers.

What are the challenges? Can you think of some areas in which
you've had to do some tough learning in regard to the role of the lab
in the university?

A big challenge is the increasing digitization of the space. Virtually any
system design that we come up with ends up with some kind of digital
application, an app for an iPhone, a tablet, or computer system, all of
them horrendously expensive and incredibly difficult to implement.
Implementation is certainly one of the first problems: how do we take
the results of our ideas and put them together in a functioning outcome
for the partner? A second problem is the issue of privacy around medi-
cal records. We're at a space now where | do believe in five years we will
all have direct control of our medical information, but at the moment
we don't, we have indirect control of it and nobody talks to each other.
We're trying to design for that space a few years out even though we
can’t implement them now without huge changes to the laws, the struc
ture, the way hospitals talk to labs, and fundamentally who controls that
information is in flux. The third one is capacity, and that’s a problem
being a small art and design school in a large community. The projects
that are coming in are fascinating; I’m quickly running out of places and
people for them, so | have to be selective about which ones to bring in.