What can speculative design teach us about designing for healthcare services?

Abstract

Understanding patient needs is an important factor in the design of healthcare services, however ethnographic research methods can be intrusive in sensitive care settings and create privacy concerns such as when researching Type 2 diabetes. We offer the Fiction Probe as a contribution in the form of a field study tool that uses storytelling to allow patients to tell their story from their perspective. We used speculative design and the multi-choice narrative, represented as a pick-a-path storybook, to re-imagine the form and content of field study research tools. With our work, we hope to expand the range of methods used to understand patients in healthcare settings and to also inspire new ways of thinking about field study research tools in sensitive care settings, and more broadly, in ambiguous design contexts.