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.