DwC09: Designing with Care

Workshop in conjunction with PervasiveHealth09.

London UK, March 31, 2009

Designing with Care

In establishing humane care next to understanding the context of use, understanding human values is a key factor towards creating acceptable pervasive healthcare applications. In order to avoid dehumanizing and stigmatizing the user, we plea to involving humans and incorporate their values in the design approach. This is especially true for designing pervasive healthcare applications, where the 'complexity of users' is increasingly sensitive. By considering human values in the design process, designers and developers can create pervasive health applications that better fit the end user needs and desires. The resistance to new technology can also be reduced by incorporating values into design.

About the workshop

The workshop will provide insights that contribute to the design methodology of pervasive healthcare technology in terms of creating a consistent set of methods and guidelines for design and evaluation of pervasive health applications. The focus will be on human values in relation to pervasive technology. We particularly invite people to share their experiences in dealing with incorporating values into the design of pervasive health systems and/or best practices understanding the sensitive issues facing when designing for the health domain.

The objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers, designers and practitioners with a clear interest in the areas of human centered design and evaluation and pervasive technologies for healthcare that contribute to a vivid discussion leading to improved methods and tools that cope with human values in designing pervasive health applications with care.

Topics addressed in the workshop include, but are not limited to:

• User involvement when end users are hard to reach
• Evaluation of pervasive healthcare applications
• Design methods and techniques
• Value-sensitive design
• Technology acceptance
• Ethical issues
• Diagnosis and monitoring practices of (chronic) patients

Expected outcome

The first outcome of this workshop is community building for researchers and practitioners interested in involving users and incorporating human values in the design and evaluation of pervasive healthcare applications. Second, a research agenda including research questions, evolving directions and relevant methods and techniques to designing and evaluating pervasive healthcare application with care, will be established. Workshop participants are encouraged to extend their position papers and contribute to a special issue designing with care. We are planning to have this special issue published with Springer Journal Ethics and Information Technology. This will be the main publication reflecting the discussions of this workshop, although the call will be open to others.