A solution that fits all perspectives.
Identity
As a designer, I identify myself as an empathic designer. I am a curious person who continuously wants to dive into a new environment to understand and feel empathy toward the people I am designing for or collaborating with. The diverse character of each project is what makes design interesting to me. Working with complex stakeholder environments, such as health care, I am driven to get to the core of the individual needs and beliefs. Bringing these needs and beliefs together makes me strive for designs that fit all perspectives. In the process, I value sharing the expert role in the design process with users and stakeholders through a participatory design approach.
As a human-centered designer, I strive for an optimal user experience by applying qualitative research methods to learn from both users and other stakeholders. Within the growing market of data-driven systems, I especially here want to maintain the feeling of empathy towards the users by creating comprehensible and inclusive designs. With my gained knowledge about data-driven technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, I can think along with data scientists about possible features of the system. Hereby, I create a bridge between data scientists and end-users.
Finally, I am a critical designer who can reflect on what tasks should be performed by technology and what by humans. I am not afraid of working on designs that relate to a topic of (societal) discussion, as I find value in researching the human-technology interaction to define the role of this new technology.
Vision
Patients are the end-users of health care as good care benefits their health. This indicates the need for a person-centered care approach in health care innovation. Designing for person-centered care asks for comprehensible designs that preserve the autonomy of the patients. The role of a designer is then to translate the patient’s perspective into new services and insights. This is to provide inclusive care, where the patient feels in charge of his care path.
Since each patient differs in their needs, personalized care is at the heart of person-centered care. The upcoming trend of Artificial Intelligence in health care, shows opportunities to both scale up innovative projects with the growing number of data, as well as use this data in such a way to create a personal care experience for patients. Conversational agents such as chatbots or digital humans can be part of this personalized experience, where people receive empathic care without increasing the pressure on health care workers.
However, I believe that designers should prevent that these data-driven innovations will substitute any medical experts. Reflecting with stakeholders on the role of technology and being critical as a designer about the division between experts and technology will eventually lead to designs that improve the overall patient experience.
To conclude, I believe that the future of health care needs person-centered designs that support medical experts by data-driven technologies in an optimal way. These designs should aim at optimizing the patient experience while embracing personalized care.
Create opportunities for person-centered care.