Sensing Spaces: Care architecture - memories of choice

Good architecture is often invisible,
but it allows whatever is happening in that space to
be the best experience possible.

Pezo von Ellrichshausen

Good architecture may have something in common with good health; it is something that can be taken for granted. When things go awry and are wrong then architecture and health suddenly impose upon us, a major intrusion.

As I may have mentioned before, in the past I've been asked how I've managed entering such and such care facility for so long. Within health there is recognition of heartsink patients. There are still heartsink buildings too. Not purpose built, seemingly either all narrow dark corridors, interrupted when doors let in shafts of light and assault dignity and privacy; or large 'lounges' that still invite armchairs to be flung against walls.

Architecture like this is not invisible. Walls are walls, blanc, flat and solid. Pictures removed due to safety concerns. Two holes and exposed plaster testify to what? Now, after six months....?

Even for the confused there are few potential found spaces, spaces to sit, stand, be; spaces towards which some personal impetus might have a person gravitate. A space of relative quite, looking out on some-thing relaxing even if not a small garden feature.

"Where's Joan, her friend's here to see her?"

"It's OK, I know where she'll be."

Royal Academy: Sensing Spaces
Education guide



 

Conference: Design as Caring in an Urban World - Final Call for Papers

Design as caring in an urban world: Royal Geographical Conference, London, Tuesday 26 to Friday 29 August 2014

In his essay, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”, Heidegger considers the interrelationships between care and design by arguing that we are only capable of building well when we know how to dwell, that is, cultivating attachments to our environments and, through this cultivation, giving and receiving care. Recent work in areas such as urban and cultural geographies, and science and technology studies, has further elaborated on this connection between care and design by exploring the affective and relational work that goes into shaping and repairing the fragile attachments between the human and non-human materials that compose the urban world. At the same time, the materiality of urban environments is often found to be inattentive to human difference and diversity, and rarely shaped by, or exposed to, a caring design ethic.

In this session, we seek to bring concepts and practices of care and design into a closer dialogue with one another in order to develop new ways of thinking about the (co) production of urban environments. It is our belief that now, more than ever, a rethinking is required about the relationships between urban design and care, as issues such as sustainability and inclusivity ask for modes of designing and dwelling that convey the affective and relational sensibilities and values of caring.

We are interested in stimulating an exchange of ideas and inspirations between urban design and care by engaging with the ways in which caring skills and sensibilities can become expressed through design practice and thinking, and also the ways in which caring knowledge can be a resource for reconfiguring urban spaces. The questions explored in the session include, but are not limited to, the following:

• How is caring embedded and expressed in daily encounters between people and urban environments, including buildings, spaces and technologies?
• What kinds of skills and values of urban design do these encounters cultivate and what can be done to make public and support these?
• How can an ethics and politics of care and caring be instilled into the design of places and what does a caring design ethic refer to and entail for practice?
• What are the pedagogic and practical challenges in creating caring design values and practices?
• How could an ethics and politics of care be mobilised as a form of constructive critique of current urban design discourses where the sensibilities and values of care have often received less attention?

Session convenors: Charlotte Bates, Rob Imrie, and Kim Kullman

Please send a proposed abstract of 200-300 words to Charlotte Bates (c.bates AT gold.ac.uk) or Kim Kullman (k.kullman AT gold.ac.uk) by February 19th 2014.

Sheffield, UK: Critical Writing Bursary - re. Design4Health Conference

Interface @ a-n The Artists Information Company is pleased to offer a Critical Writing Bursary to visit and write about the Design4Health Conference at Sheffield Hallam University. The bursary includes £150 and a free three-day conference pass (worth £495). It includes lunch on all three days, plus the conference networking dinner on Thursday evening) to enable one writer to visit and review Design4Health Conference at Sheffield Hallam University.

 

Full details at www.a-n.co.uk/interface/article/3389752

 

To apply, please email interface@a-n.co.uk by 5pm on Monday 10 June with a short statement of no more than 200 words outlining your interest in the conference and exhibition. 

 

Apologies for cross posting. Please circulate to students and colleagues.

__________________________

 

Kirsty Christer - Research Publications and Events Officer

Art and Design Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University, UK

e: k.a.christer at shu.ac.uk | t: +44 (0) 114 225 6918 | f: +44 (0) 114 225 6702 | www.design4health.org.uk

D4H accommodation page: http://bit.ly/ZqdQff

 

 

Self-care: The Long Answer (Ack. HSJ)

Here is another item from the HSJ:

"There is often a Berlin Wall between formal and informal caring environments both in the NHS and in social care," he says [Alex Fox, Shared Lives Plus]. He argues that patient care needs to be de-institutionalised.
"If we are going to get anything from all the effort and heartache that has gone in to the NHS reforms, CCGs need to take a holistic view of a person, like good GPs do, and understand that a range of factors go in to someone's health and wellbeing and it is finding models that fit personalised and self-care."

Helen Mooney, (2012). The Long Answer, Health Service Journal supplement (Long term conditions). 28 June. p.1.

Staying with the vertical axis of Hodges' model there is something beyond the delineation of INDIVIDUAL and GROUP (POPULATION) that this axis performs. It bisects the horizon of external reality that is frequently differentiated into what is HUMANISTIC and what is often described as MECHANISTIC. If not these terms then the humanities and the sciences.

From a mental health perspective and taking the above reference to 'institution' literally we can reflect upon how the Victorians sought to standardise provision of care for the mentally ill with the asylums. This was a scientific and political solution to an interpersonal and social problem. Institutions continue to be disempowering, in physical and psychological care. In a way this Victorian solution is still ongoing. On the journey from institution, to community, to home, to self... there is still a long way to go.

The system created to the mechanistic right within the model was custodial. As far as society was concerned the people there were forgotten. A community within a community was re-created. The person, the individual was lost and we are still trying to find them. Progress has been made and can be mapped across Hodges' model. As one example how has the student nurse's learning experience changed over the decades?

That INDIVIDUAL-GROUP axis, the red line in the figure is the Berlin Wall that we are still trying to tear down.

There is another view on this which I'll save for the future.

Call for Papers: 2nd European Design4Health Conference

I am pleased to [announce] the Call for Papers for the 2nd European Design4Health Conference, which will be held at Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK from Wed 3rd to Fri 5th July 2013.


The conference provides a platform for dialogue between designers, healthcare professionals, funding bodies, researchers and users. We invite submissions to the conference in the following forms:

• Abstract submissions: extended abstracts that address the conference themes
• Exhibition proposals: exhibits of innovative artefacts or systems that make significant progress in design for health

Please visit www.design4health.org.uk for full details.

Kind regards
Kirsty Christer and Dr Alaster Yoxall

Edited from source - JISCMAIL for context (no attachments). PJ

Reflections on: Designing for Self-Care - the home-clinic difference

As much as I might like to I will not be able to attend Copenhagen and the workshop details of which I posted yesterday. Reading the call for papers prompted the following reflections - many of which may not be relevant to the actual workshop content, but hopefully help illustrate Hodges' model:

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

literacy - health literacy, cognitive access, insight, memory, education, communication, attitudes, motivation*, beliefs, BEFORE-AFTER holistic measures, mental health, mood, context, therapeutic modalities, self-recording, person-al purposes - process reconciliation, coding / classification, self data capture, expectations, general health perception, sleep, leisure, independence level (self-efficacy), individual 'clinic' need / attendance, rating of existing clinical relationships, DOO - (presence of) differences of opinion*

physical interface modalities: touch, gesture, eye movement, video interviews; clinical diagnoses (primary), observations, assessment-measures, data capture, medications, lab tests, pain, 'distances' (several not just home-clinic); treatment/drugs - training, mobility (room count, vistas), info prescription, other media - learning materials, self-care tasks (granularity, number, complexity, ...), clinic-al purposes - process reconciliation, evidenced interventions, coding / classification, home adaptations?, experience of telecare? mobile apps? home IT / comms, chronological:pathological age definitions: long term- / chronic

life story, narrative medicine, quality of life, care history - duration / exposure to care systems, domestic relationships, primary care / nursing (multidisciplinary care) relationships, perceived integration of care, social network, access to day care / respite care, definitions - shared vocabulary, self-care folksonomy? (virtual) community creation (outcomes)? affordances, meaning of 'clinic' attendance, 'CKO-X' Carer's Knowledge of

autonomy, power in the home: My space?, service interfaces, available specialist services, responsiveness, support, best interests, privacy, budgets (self), protocol - referrals, political emphasis: physical-mental health? predefined benefits, economic impacts, savings, policy reach, implications for commissioning

As the workshop concerns home - clinic difference and designing for self-care this prompted me to a more detailed consideration of the 'distances' involved. Not just in the physical geographical sense of home-clinic travel (car, walking, public transport, disabled transport) but when last the citizen (patient) visited various locations.

There are many other dimensions of course ... the final context reduces the above to something manageable.

1st Int. Workshop on Designing for Self-Care: Acknowledging the home-clinic difference

Hi,
We invite position papers and works-in-progress papers for the first international workshop on "Designing for self-care: Acknowledging the home-clinic difference" to be held alongside NordiCHI on 14th October, at the IT-University of Copenhagen.

Kindly consider submitting your work, and / or share with your network.

Regards,
Naveen Bagalkot

 ----------------------------- Call For Papers -----------------------------

Image source: The CfP website

Workshop theme: Supporting the movement of care across boundaries

Increasingly successful healthcare involves moving the care activities across the clinic-home boundaries. The field of HCI has increasingly explored ways to design digital technological tools to support this movement of care beyond the boundaries of a clinic.

However, the clinic and the home offer different settings, shaping the care activities in different ways. Acknowledging this difference of settings, opens up the space for various positions that designers can take for the design for self-care. We identify three key positions:

• Home as a place for caring: A focus on supporting the citizens to perform self-care activities at home that may (or may not) involve a larger network of family, friends, home care nurses, volunteers and home care workers.
• Clinic as a place for caring: A focus on supporting the care-givers at the clinic to prescribe home-based care activities to the citizens, and monitor how these are being complied with.
• Moving across the boundaries: A focus on supporting the citizens to move across the clinic-home boundaries, bringing with them materials from the clinic to home, and sharing the self-care activities from home with their care-givers at the clinic.

We offer these three positions as a starting point to invite researchers and practitioners working in this space of designing digital technological tools for self-care to become part of the workshop discourse. In particular we invite them to submit their positions in a 4-page ACM SIGCHI extended abstract format, based on their own empirical experiences and / or theoretical deliberations.

  

Workshop goals

• To bring together researchers from HCI and interaction design, and professional caregivers, to discuss and outline the challenges and promises posed by the different individual settings for care, and moving across these settings.
• To share insights from a range of cases about the challenges and successful strategies in designing digital technology for self-care.
• To explore promising design strategies and approaches for dealing with the challenges and promises posed by the different settings of care.

Workshop Outcomes

All accepted papers should bring a poster representing their paper to the workshop. This will be used during the workshop and its discussions. While shorter presentation of each paper will take place, the focus will be on more interactive sessions where the participants will interview each other, group work and plenum discussions. The workshop aims to share current work, methods, challenges and insights when working with, or designing for, home-based care.

  

Proceedings

The workshop will produce its proceedings in the form of an online database, which will be open to access by all interested researchers, practitioners and students. We are also looking into options to publish the proceedings with an ISBN number so that it is publicly available, and the possibility to make a journal special issue after the workshop. The proceedings will include:

• The call for position papers, which highlights the motivations and the theme of the workshop.
• The accepted position papers, and the respective posters.
• The minutes of the plenary discussions and the summary of the group work.

Submission format

Maximum four pages in ACM SIGCHI extended abstract format.

  

Contact details

Email the position papers to: rehabws2012 (at) yahoo.com

More details can be found on: http://users-cs.au.dk/gronvall/nordichi_rehab2012/index.html

NHS Hack Day Past & Future + HANDI health

Whether it's web magazines, web design sites, Drupal, or Ruby presentations you cannot escape from the app.

Health is no different being a major field of development. I did not make the NHS Hack Day in May and I may be away for the next in September 22-23th which is planned at ADA Liverpool. If you can make it register now!

There is also HANDI and no doubt a multitude of other international groups working on innovative apps that can and already are making a real difference to people's health and social care outcomes.

London nhs hack day presentation may 2012

View more presentations from Carl Reynolds

Student placements and public engagement - over the years

Mentoring student nurses has always been and remains a non-trivial professional obligation. It is something that I have always enjoyed. I make a point of not wittering on and on about h2cm - well maybe a little :) . To save the student's patience and assure my time it is good to ensure a well-rounded placement.

Over the years I've engaged in community service and research projects so looking to the humanistic domains comes naturally. It's been quite interesting watching the various efforts the health sector has made to engage the public. There's no imperative, but I make a point of highlighting the possible learning to be had in contacting the local public involvement and engagement people. Students have found this to be quite enlightening. Encounters with the Community Health Council [CHC] especially so, although that seems a long time ago now.

The Health Service Journal (still catching up) reminded me of all this in the summer, c/o Calkin & West, 4 August 2011 pp. 4-5. This news item spanned my whole career outlining the history of such bodies:

• Community Health Councils: 1974 - 2003
• Patient and Public Involvement Forums 2003 - 2008
• Local Involvement Networks 2008 - 2012
• HealthWatch 2012 - ?

I even remember the demise of the CHC being reported. Actually no, correct that: I remember the report of the CHC's teeth being taken out before their end. As you look at the timeline represented above it seems to suggest either less stability, or less significance has set in; maybe both. The title of the above piece reads: Plans for engagement are 'insulting'.

Whether or not the CHC ever had sharp canines (with an extra full-moon glisten) and a bite force like a croc is something for the archaeologists to check. One thing for sure, it seems subsequent bodies have no need of dental check-ups, being sans teeth.

Working in the community it was heartening to see the CHC doing its work locally. I also read recently (HSJ I'm sure) how public involvement was finally enshrined in the The National Health Service Act 2006. So you see how progressive the CHC was. It is a great shame this momentum cannot be maintained - for reasons we'll return to in 2012.

For now, as students enter their third year I think it helps to bring life to the POLITICAL care domain. It matters. This ongoing issue is central to health services provision, planning, innovation and the commons ...