— Digital Care Experience: Going Public — 

Understanding for design

Prior to the design workshop we conducted several site visits and interviews with staff concerning their work practice. After a rapid analysis of this data we developed a series of Day-in-the-Life scenarios (Reimann and Bacon, 2004), which described current work practice. These represented fragments of staff's ongoing and everyday work experience. An example scenario is below:

Story 4: Next week’s fun…

You are taking the residents to the cinema this afternoon and some of them are pretty excited about going. However, some residents don’t seem that enthused and have not indicated they are going. You have a chat to a few of them to encourage them to go. They seem a little interested, but seem to need some more encouragement.

Since we were concerned that these scenarios actually were in some way descriptive of the health care workers' activity, we wanted to get an answer to some key questions. We were primarily concerned with getting an indication if these scenarios were typical and using them to probe important issues regarding thier work (e.g. information transfer).

1. Is this a realistic story?
2. Is the situation described frequent and/or critical?
3. Does communication technology currently play a role in this kind of situation?
4. Could communication technology help in this kind of situation?

Co-realisation and Co-production

In the design workshop we facilitated we were concerned with verifying the understanding we had of the staff's work and facilitating some co-realised designs. After all the scenarios we presented were 'verified' (all staff agreed that they were realistic, but thought their importance varied), we presented a futuristic scenario, describing possible current practice using MMS technology and a public display. Our intention was to use this to facilitate envisagement of new technology involving both staff. One design that emerged from this was a situated digital display that could have the following features:

1. Ability to display and receieve photos from trips out involving residents:
   "I can imagine some of the residents at Durranhill out on a daytrip to Blackpool forwarding photographs of "We're having a great time at Blackpool Tower." You know that has got a bit of the fun element and the serious element...";
2. Ability to display images and accompanying text supporting healthy eating habits:
   "The other thing, the other thing that we talked about was the actual displays that you've got and the kinds of messages that are on there. And basically at Durranhill you have these three big message boards that have got different, slightly different types of information. The kitchen has things with healthy eating, the one in the hall has things about different health groups and so on...";
3. Ability to display information on shift staff:
   "Okay, so what do you think would be good with...with the staff, saying, you know: 'This is the staff, one of the members of staff on duty this week is Barry...'".

Researchers involved

Keith Cheverst (Lancaster University: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/staff/kc/), Mark Rouncefield (Lancaster University: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/staff/rouncefield/rouncefield.htm) & Connor Graham (University of Melbourne: http://www.dis.unimelb.edu.au/staff/cgraham/).

Funding bodies

Equator, Melbourne Abroad Travelling Scholarship from Melbourne University

References

Reimann, R. M. and Bacon, E. (2001) A Scenario-Based Approach to Creating Interaction Frameworks, URL http://depts.washington.edu/dmgwksp/PP/reimann_bacon.pdf, Accessed 8 Sept 2004