Please resuscitate! How to share a project concerning self-management in diabetes to enable participants to elaborate on it after project completion

Abstract

This paper discusses how we developed and shared documentation of a participatory design project ‘Bespoke design’, in which three personalised self-management tools are designed for three participants with type 1 diabetes. To generate a larger impact and prevent the project from fading out after its completion, the design team aims to enable other interested parties (designers, developers, people with diabetes, etcetera) to elaborate on the project, e.g. rework or alter the tools and ideas for new contexts. We refer to this objective as ‘generativity’ (Erikson, 1950; Zittrain, 2008; Van Osch & Avital, 2009). Documenting and sharing practices in the context of generativity is predominantly concentrated on the material aspects of a design, enabling others to remake it (Huybrechts, Storni & Schoffelen, 2014; Schoffelen & Huybrechts, 2013). However, the inclusion of immaterial aspects, in the form of meanings and viewpoints of participants on the project’s process and results (e.g. Dix, 2007; Avital, 2011; Kanstrup, 2012), can generate an additional impact. It supports an interpretative and generative discourse that can result into a wider range of variations on concepts and meanings involved, instead of merely concentrating on developing (new) self-management tools. This approach better fits the complexity of design projects in the field of health care. In this paper we evaluate Make-and-tell, a toolkit developed to support design teams to specifically document and share these immaterial viewpoints and material aspects, as used in the project ‘Bespoke Design’.status: publishe