Participatory User Research Towards Healthcare Design

With the extension of the discipline of design and emerging complicated problems in this area, user research targeted at discovering user requirements and providing necessary support for design activities has become a more and more important subject. With reference to relevant subjects such as sociology, psychology, marketing and statistics, methods of user research in the traditional category of design tend to approach the problems based on quantitative analysis centered on efficiency and availability while producing direct evidence for subsequent activities. By focusing mainly on the physical attributes of the user group, such methods pay little attention to their potential needs and motivation, while having high requirement on project cost and number of subjects. Therefore, under the influence of “user-centered design”, users are playing more and more important role in design research with their behavior mode and emotional experience as the focus. The idea of “participative design” has provided the theoretical and methodological reference for users participating in design process. In addition, other practice innovations and topic discussions have also set the foundation for introduction and application of the participatory theory in design field. While “user participation” has been found in plenty of design practice as a matter of consensus, research on such phenomenon is still in the beginning stage without a complete and independent system established.A concept of “participatory user research” is put forward in this research. By looking into resources of the participatory theory, establishing application categories and summarizing relevant methods and tools, theoretical basis and specific approaches of early and active user involvement in design process are explored. Through the design project “Patient-centred Design Research: An Explorative User Research on Chronic Disease in China”, participative approaches are utilized to discover and define how elderly patients are managing themselves and being involved in relevant medical services when living with chronic diseases, leading to a set of insights and design concepts, based on which previously established methods and framework are evaluated and validated. Finally, strategy analysis on applications of participatory user research in patient-centered healthcare design is performed, providing theoretical support and practice reference for further design researches and activities.