Hospital to Home: DJCAD Student Outcomes

As part of our Hospital to Home Project I involved three Service Design Students from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD) in the co-design workshop process I ran in Tayside (Read their reflections here).

During this time they have been working with IRISS with the aim of developing outcomes for their final submission.

Two of the students (Lorri Smyth and Aishwarya Lyengar) have developed a new tool that aims to enable improved communication between older people and the people who matter to them.

They evidenced that they had gathered insights from older people, highlighting that they (older people) did not share relevant information with their family or carers regarding their health needs and day to day wants and needs. Instead older people tend to have informal conversations about these subjects with their friends, who may or may not have a caring role in their life. The aim of this tool is to engage older people and encourage them to communicate more with those who are most relevant to their care.

Their outcome was well received by the working group with many members asking how the tool could be embedded into their professional role in practice or how they could use one with their own families. Lorri and Ash are now working together to take this idea forward in Tayside.

The third student working with the working group was Autumn Wang. Autumn focused her time with the group on establishing a tool and system that offers support for planning and facilitating design-led workshops.

Her work identified that conducting workshops requires elaborate planning and preparation. This created a niche opportunity to explore how workshop planning and facilitation could be better guided and simplified for people who need assistance in preparation for workshops. Autumn took a Service Design approach to create a complete package called ‘Workshop Whitebox’ that offers both a guide and a checklist for beginners wishing to run workshops. http://workshopwhitebox.weebly.com).