Designing Care. How Design can improve medical products for a therapeutic wellbeing

Abstract

The evolution of healthcare sector has been recently accelerating in terms of design both methodologically and technologically, changing habits, structures and the way users and designers look at medical products (Chamberlain, 2015). Going beyond the functional aspect and according to a perspective in which patients are increasingly at the center of the project, the Design discipline must face also the sensitive and emotional aspect of the object with the aim to create an effective therapeutic product/environment (Ulrich, 2004; Dijkstra, 2006). Thanks to some field-based research experiences involving the Evidence-Based Design, the User-Centred Design and Research Through Design methodology, the paper shows how an emotional-sensorial approach in designing products for healthcare can improve the user well-being in therapeutic terms. Through the direct observation of the users and their interaction with the medical artefacts examined, the research has moved beyond the limits of the quantitative data by highlighting qualitative data that has been useful in generating the "Design for Care" model.