Facilitating Users and Designers Towards a Shift of Perspective for True Participation in Co-creation in Health Care: A Holistic Activity Theoretical Approach

Paper in proceeding, 2020

Modern healthcare is a complicated sociotechnical system where medical technology is a prerequisite for quality as well as cost-effectiveness. New and complex technologies for diagnosis and treatment are progressively developed to meet the challenge of future health care. However, this requires increasingly close cooperation by heterogeneous stakeholders with various views that must be heard and negotiated. Traditional participatory design approaches may not suffice to establish the needed close cooperation. This paper builds on the authors’ research over the last decades on eliciting stakeholders needs and requirements in the development of medical products by means of participatory design processes, analysed by Activity Theory (AT). By facilitating stakeholders’ interactions with mediating tools, the rules and relationships that shape behaviours and outcomes to become visible. AT reveals and supports our understanding from a holistic perspective of the need for a shift of perspectives to form a new and shared activity system in a collaborative space that bridges the gaps between participants and thus holistically allows individuals to bring their respective knowledge, experiences, and motivations into co- creation processes. This requires a meta-shift of perspective that needs to be facilitated in the co-creation process and can only occur if and when participants are enabled to understand the process and the role(s) they have.