Paula Melo Signerez, Fernando Secomandi, Dirk Snelders, Judith Rietjens
Designing future healthcare requires more than an understanding of how technologies work. We need to better understand how people experience healthcare encounters: what they find difficult, what they need to understand, and how decisions affect their everyday lives. Co-design provides ways of bringing these experiences into design, but traditionally relies on people coming together in shared healthcare or workshop settings, limiting who is able to participate. Patients, caregivers, healthcare professionals, researchers, and members of the public may be geographically dispersed or face circumstances that make physical participation difficult. Remote Participatory Bodystorming (RPB) explores how experience-based participation can be extended when people are unable to take part in the same physical setting.
How can we involve people in designing future healthcare services?
In this project, we combine bodystorming with remote, video-mediated participation. Healthcare encounters are explored through embodied enactment and translated into short video scenarios that can be shared with participants in different locations. In our research within the European 4D PICTURE project, these scenarios portray consultations in which digital prognostic tools are introduced during cancer treatment decision-making. Participants from different backgrounds and locations watch the scenarios and reflect on the interaction, communication, emotional experience, and role of technology. Their responses can then inform further design exploration and iteration. In this way, RPB uses shared healthcare scenarios to create a common point of reference without requiring participants to be physically co-present.
Remote Participatory Bodystorming creates opportunities to involve broader and more geographically dispersed healthcare communities in experience-based design. Our research suggests that shared scenarios can help participants explore healthcare interactions from different perspectives and identify emotional, relational, communicative, and practical aspects that may be difficult to anticipate through discussion alone. At the same time, a video scenario is not the same as a real healthcare encounter, and participation remains shaped by what participants are shown, their own experiences, and the context of the activity. RPB is therefore not a replacement for direct participation or traditional co-design, but an additional way to connect distributed communities through shared situations, reflection, and iterative design.
