Technical Writing Pedagogy and Empathetic Medical Intervention: Using Design Thinking to Teach Wholistic Patient Care

Abstract

While all theoretical approaches to technical communication share a focus on the end user, the layperson on the other end of the communication experience, few schools of thought in the milieux of technical communication emphasize the user as heavily as the Scandinavian cooperative design models, or design thinking, developed as part of the Utopia Project. Starting from roots in Norway in the early 1970s and fleshed out a decade later as part of the Utopia Project, cooperative design heuristics teach that the end user is not merely a passive receiver of information but rather a valuable partner in developing the strongest designs. While the origins of cooperative design may have begun as a regional movement in Europe, its core mission to empower the user as an active and vital member of a production team has made worldwide impact (Bødker et al., 2020; Sundblad, 2008). This prolific impact stems from the components of design thinking, which utilizes the heuristic found in figure 2. Unlike linear, top-down problem-solution models, design thinking, to borrow terminology from Arne Van Oosterom, senior partner and founder of Designthinkers Group.