Design Research Studio
Designing hospital experience for people
Breathing hard, you walk in through the door someone generously held open for you. With the hand that is not holding the cane, you try to fix your glasses so that you can read the direction to the optical department that is barely readable from 2 feet away. You make it to the waiting area about 20 minutes earlier even though you made 3 wrong turns by misreading signs, because ever since your 70th birthday, you try to come an hour early to every event since it usually takes longer to get somewhere nowadays. As you open your ears wide, waiting for someone to call your name, the thoughts come up in your mind, “Will I lose my sight?” “Would I not be able to see my newborn granddaughter?” “Who will feed and take Johnny on walks now?”.
…
Above is just one example, but there are many negative emotions that make one fall deeper and deeper into them waiting for a news that can likely be bad in a hospital setting. I haven’t experience the same intensity of fear regarding bodily disabilities, but as someone who often falls into the depressing train of thoughts, I want to design an experience where it minimizes devastating amount of worries, while letting the patient see their situation with clarity and feel at least somewhat prepared for the time to come if they are presented with a bad news.
Below is my initial thoughts regarding emotions that one might go through in this process.
Week 2
Catherine Getchell Talk Reflection
There was an opportunity for us to get to listen to the story of how it is like to be a person with vision impairments, and how others’ attitude towards her makes her feel.
This was another step for me to see the people with various types of disabilities without pity, without the passive perspective towards the difficulties they have to face, but with respect, humility, and willingness to listen for ways to assist in tackling the problems they face. The talk made me see again how much I am accustomed to the unhealthy paradigm of giving pity to the “different” rather than accommodating for those without access to the resources they deserve. Honestly, it’s something that we picked up in society that has not been willing to actually accommodate for people whose needs are not so adjacent to the majority’s.
The more I heard about different ways that the people with vision impairment make many efforts to pursue independence, became deeper the realization of how ignorant and lazy I have been. The screen reader was something that makes so much sense once I got exposed to it, but I never knew, revealing how little attention I have paid for the problems my neighbors are going through.
I used to think, and still do, that altruism and love for neighbors shown in the form of kindness makes us more human. However, that does not mean that there always has to be a person assisting someone. For both the helper and the receiver, this is painful. The people with vision impairment should be provided independence as well.
How Might We?
- Make the experience of remembering instructions / information easier when it’s difficult for the patients to memorize the vast amount of information that is being given to them, especially when a lot of them don’t know how to read braille? (main audience would be people who are experiencing a sudden loss of sight)
- Let the non-English speakers know that they can, and should reach out for preventative healthcare when their notion of healthcare in US is inaccessible, expensive, and intimidating without someone to guide them through the process? Possibly at least letting them know what resources are free, discourage unhealthy habits regard various symptoms?
- Create a form filling out interaction that can be accessed within an environment comfortable to the user, without a person describing individual sections of the form verbally. Can the forms be verbally filled out?
- Create a device that allows one who has completely lost vision to navigate through the clinic based on collage of inputs auditory and tactile?
Type of interactions in hospital
Ashili Molinero Talk Reflection
From the guest lecture, I learned again, how designing for accessibility is not really a noble, super profound, nor great thing. Such ideas were making the opportunities to design for the people with disabilities seem inaccessible. Many of the stories Ashili Monlinero shared with us were about how people lack common sense in thinking in the perspective of people in need of accommodation, the possibilities such people being our colleagues and us becoming disabled in various aspects.
This shows:
- The “healthy” people usually don’t think they will ever be in the position needing accommodations.
- Because of this, most of us find it difficult to imagine ourselves in the shoes of the people with need for accessible designs and services and make mistakes that could’ve been prevented very easily.
As much as it is important to create tools that directly help the people with disabilities, I learned that the awareness of the communities are very important, too.
Rachel Delphia Talk Reflection
Listening to Rachel Delphia, the biggest realization I had was the concern for quality of life for people with various disabilities, not just in topics like being able to move, see, hear, but in how to enjoy types of entertainments as well as accessories with comfort.
She showed us many examples regarding accessibility and ways for people with disabilities to appreciate beauty in some kind of a way that she encountered being a curator at a museum. This added a new dimension to what we can think about and zoom into. Questions such as “how can we create accessibility toos that are beautiful to wear?” or “how can we let the audience with disabilities enjoy the musical?” showed me how inconsiderate I was in thinking about the “joy” in the lives of people with disabilities.
I am curious now, what would experiences “made for” the PwD (people with disabilities) look like? Right now, different entertainments such as musicals or concerts are meant for those who are able to take inputs from the various sensory organs. So sometimes it can’t be helped but to be forced when different interventions are designed to tweak the experiences into what they weren’t initially intended for.
It Should Start From Me
Through the talks given during studio, my most important finding was how much I don’t know about the people with BLV. I had no idea what tool they use, how they train themselves for orientation, and other basic things I should’ve known.
With this realization, I started thinking more about how the community can change rather than asking the person with BLV to use a product we developed for them to use in a space not meant for them, or without really understanding their intentions and values. Through reading various stories and hearing from the guest lecturers, a recurring theme was how different actions people take with the intention of being kind to a person with BLV are actually uncomfortable, harmful, even threatening for the receiver of the action.
For example, Chris Downey, an architect who became blind, but still works as one, mentioned how one time someone just grabbed him without any kind of notice, and pulled him across the crosswalk. The person who offered this inconsiderate help might have known better if a proper education had taken place earlier in his life.
So the new “how might we” my team started thinking is:
“How might we educate people about how to properly approach, assist, and interact with the people with blindness, low-vision conditions in an approachable way with real stories of experiences?”
Persona map
Based on findings regarding the common age of patients with visual impairment and people’s common depth of knowledge about interacting and assisting people with BLV, we created a persona.
Journey map
- comparing the emotions, level of preparation of the patient, of a caretaker between prepared / not prepared
3 Initial ideas
- Urban building game: A set of abstract block-like physical pieces. There can be pre-made layouts that are given as a problem, which will be a representation of infrastructures that are not considerate of vision disability. The participants will try to solve the problem by rearranging the pieces to better accommodate the people with BLV.
2. Digital app / extension: An online library of stories from BLV patients about various situations that they’ve experienced. Somewhat similar to an online forum (ex. Reddit), but with better search tools through categorization. Meant to educate, especially for those who are doing researches.
3. Interactive map: An interactive map that builds upon our original building activity, but focuses more on the map’s takeaways, through the forms of projections or interactions, rather than the act of building in order to understand certain details.
Deciding Direction
My partner and I decided to create an interactive activity where people can learn how to properly interact or assist BLV patients from real stories from the patients themselves. We realized we should take advantage of interactive and hybrid aspects of the examples we found in the initial ideas phase for this purpose because:
- A lot of people just assume how to interact or assist the BLV patients, which likely leads to negative results, emotionally or physically.
- There are resources online which talks about social etiquettes, as well as real first-hand experience stories around the topic of accessibility about people who are visually impaired, but a lot of them are not approachable in their presentation.
We saw that there is an opportunity for creating an interaction to make such information more easily accessible and even enjoyable to learn. Diving into this opportunity, we came up with the idea of using physical blocks to use as both a metaphor for finding a proper solution to a situation, as well as a key to access the pool of information that exists in the digital realm, in an exciting way.
The idea would be: when the user places a story block on the interface, a situation associated with the block would pop-up and the user would have to find matching blocks with correct information on proper way to interact with a BLV patient in the situation.
Lo-fi User Testing
Before pushing this idea further, we wanted to test out how people will respond to the pieces as well as the idea of information being associated with each block. We used Figma to create a 2D version of what we were imagining and asked people to figure out what this is about with brief instructions. After the observing people’s reactions and receiving feedback, we realized that the number of pieces, the complexity of shapes, and the amount of information that’s displayed should not be overwhelming, but approachable.
This was an important realization that reminded us the very purpose of this experience, and that it shouldn’t be about the blocks themselves, but what people will learn after interacting with them. The blocks are mediums, but they shouldn’t hinder potential users from approaching because they look too difficult.
Confirming Technology
One question we had was, “how would the interface recognize the different shapes of blocks?”. Though we might not create a complete and refined device itself, we wanted to make sure that it was something feasible with existing technology we can access. We tested out the 3D printed versions of the blocks and used Teachable Machine, a machine learning tool based on image training, to see if it can identify different forms from another, and we found out that it is possible and quite accurate.
We also wanted to create a pool of stories like the one above where people with no in-person access to the installation can approach virtually, as well as for those who want to learn more about numerous stories of different BLV patients further after the in-person experience. This part of the experience was to exist in the digital realm, but with association to the blocks in representing the stories. The visualization was inspired by Tinkercad’s way of showing different combination of hardwares for various purposes.
When we shared this idea with Daphne, our instructor, she also provided us a case study called, “Learning in the Real World Tops Learning From a Tablet”. It talked about how incorporating physical objects can enhance the quality of learning, rather than purely using screens to teach the same material. This study provided a good basis in moving forward with this idea further.
Midterm Review
Guests: Wayne Chung, Gretchen Mendoza (UPMC), Matt Zywica
Feedback notes
- shapes: explain meaning + fit; maybe simpler cuts
- emphasize audience + purpose = clearer & succinct structure
- emphasize “etiquette”
- consider taking out “Extension: MICRO” slide; causes confusion about primary idea
The presentation taught us first of all how previous versions we gave to those within the Environments track allowed better understanding for them, but not so suitable for one-time use for people encountering it for the first time. Some parts of the inspirational images were misguiding, as well as leaving the audience feeling dissonance between what we were saying vs. content on the slide.
Some valuable suggestions from the audience were clearer and more explicit wording. In this case, “etiquette”. Also, it seemed like we didn’t emphasize the overall structure in a memorable manner that organizes the whole presentation. Additionally, we were encouraged to have a more specific storyboard of the experience.
- Detailed storyboarding for the experience & instruction, then simplify
- Adopting a clearer structure (ex. background, research, problem, iteration, feedback, refine) in presentation.
- Reaching out to different faculties for feedback, Stacie for educational game design specifically
- onboarding experience for personalization
After the feedback session, my partner and I discussed to flush out the better details of the user’s journey, regarding the changes in different state we expect the user to be in, in terms of questions and opportunities.
Feedback — Daphne & Yiwei
- clarification in the word “user” — the order of the structure in the presentation
- splitting the specification from the general ideas — 1min, 5min, 20min guests vs. the general audience
- seriousness of the environment vs. friendliness to welcome the participants
- A project at CMU about story receipt printer, which meant to encourage students to read => What if there is physical takeaway related to the stories?
We learned more ways to improve the clarity of our project when presenting during the feedback session in class, as well as ideas for additional interaction and artifact users might be able to bring home.
What stood out was making the experience available and flexible for users with different amount of attention and time at hand. This led us to an idea about creating a supplementary experience as part of the installation space. Thinking about this made us look back at the space we are designing for, which was the waiting area where people are likely to spend time as well as a decent amount of foot traffic. For this, we looked at the renders the client shared with us.
Taking into account the affordance of the space, we wanted to create an experience where it would take ~3 minutes for someone passing by to easily go through, but still learn about social etiquettes regarding visual accessibility from a first-hand story of a BLV patient.
Final Environment
After creating a more detailed flow, we moved on to creating the actual interaction happening on the interface, and visualization of the installation.
Overall Visual Theme
The visual aesthetic changed overtime throughout the project. We were uncertain in the beginning if it should look playful, or match the atmosphere of the hospital. Especially when we received questions asking us that it may be inconsiderate of feelings of people in the hospital if we were to have a bright visual aesthetic, we were wondering if this should also reinforce the hospital’s atmosphere. However, we found precedents in RxArt, an organization that installs artworks in hospitals, saying that art can be effective in bringing energy into the hospital space that can be gloomy by offsetting the existing atmophsere.
The Table
Interface Interaction
We went through many iterations of interface design. In the process, we added a feature called “browse” where one can access to see what stories are available instead of learning through matching the blocks.
Also, to make the flow more beginner friendly, we added the tutorial-like aspect to the interface. This was our response to the likelihood of many people finding our installation new and unfamiliar.
Table’s Form
Since our main experience required people to take time to read stories and interact with blocks, we chose to create a table with a space for the blocks and the interface for the user to work on. In this process, we discussed what is an approachable aesthetic as well as the form.
We received feedback from Eric Anderson, a product design professor in working on the form, which helped us see the difficulties the user may have to face regarding the height, reaching for the blocks, legroom, etc. As we kept iterating, we came down to a form that is playful and comfortable (regarding the dimension although we couldn’t build the actual artifact), while carrying all the features necessary.
Interactive Mural
As our response to the feedback mentioned earlier about creating an experience for those who have little time available, we came up with an idea of interactive mural, where people can listen to or read a story of a BLV patient.
The mural would be activated if a person approaches it within a certain distance. In order to not disturb other people in the waiting area, an audio system that projects sound only within a designated area will be used.
Surroundings & Final Environment
Rather than just putting the tables in the waiting area, we wanted to make use of the floor, walls, and the pillars that were in the space. So we created graphics that will help the visitors recognize the presence of the installation.
