1 Prototyping (in) Healthcare Tariq Andersen, Jonas Moll, Troels Mønsted Human-Centered Computing, Dept. of Computer Science University of Copenhagen Njalsgade 128, Bldg. 24, 5th floor DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark tariq@diku.dk, jonas@jermiin.dk, monsted@diku.dk WORKSHOP INTRODUCTION As Participatory Design (PD) moves into healthcare distinct practical issues emerge. We argue that PD researchers need to respond to these new challenges by establishing an ongoing dialogue on the practicalities of e.g. prototyping in healthcare. With this workshop we intend to start such reflections by focusing on practical issues of prototyping, such as ‘how to organize PD prototyping in healthcare?’ and ‘how to run and manage prototypes in everyday medical practice?’. During the workshop the results of participants’ work on problems and solutions will collaboratively be turned into a booklet. GOALS With this workshop we wish to bring forth the multitude of practicalities we face as PD researchers when prototyping (in) healthcare. Drawing on participants’ own solutions to practical problems in PD research we intend to explore common challenges of doing research by prototyping. The goal of the workshop is twofold: a) to facilitate discussions by exploring participants’ work on problems and solutions when prototyping in healthcare and b) to collaboratively document the outcome of the workshop in a booklet. The booklet mirrors a first take on articulating practical problems of prototyping in healthcare as ‘tricks of the trade’. It will contain the presented situations, challenges and solutions. RELEVANCE TO PD The domain of healthcare is characterized by being particularly heterogeneous as it is often distributed across organizations, professions, time and space. This leaves methodical challenges to PD. Gennari and Reddy (2000) propose PD methods and techniques for systems development in healthcare as a valuable, but often neglected approach, in the early stages of the process. Introducing PD induces attention to the social environment (Sjøberg and Timpka, 1998) and aids uncovering requirements for healthcare systems (Kristensen, Kyng, and Palen, 2006). Within the PD community, projects in healthcare have applied various techniques such as video ethnography and on the spot experiments (Björgvinsson and Hillgren, 2004), workplace observations and scenario based questionnaire, participatory design workshops (Pemberton et al., 2006), and IT prototyping experiments (Simonsen and Hertzum, 2006). Furthermore field studies, workshops and prototyping (Aarhus et al., 2009), ‘reflective probes’ (Kanstrup et al., 2008), future workshops, and patient home visits by interview and prototype experiments (Aarhus, Grönvall, and Kyng, 2010) have been conducted. These studies all present results from using various PD techniques, but rarely discuss the practicalities of applying them. Discussions such as ‘how and with which tools researchers in practice succeeded to organize, carry out and manage these techniques’ are limited in the literature. Other similar questions include ‘how was the relationship with users carried out using which tools?’, ‘what kind of work was done to manage the connection between research agenda and design?’, and ‘how was patients motivated and health professionals addressed by doing which actions?’. Finally, ’how was access to the healthcare setting accomplished and what kind of negotiation was necessary to engage health professionals?’ Participation can be seen as ‘the negotiation of relations in interaction’ (Matthews, 2009). It is then the kind of performative actions and materials used to establish participation that we wish to foreground. It is the tools used to plan and the class of work needed to be done before, during, and after participation takes place that we want to make visible on this workshop. With this call we acknowledge that we as PD researchers are practitioners ourselves (Pedersen, 2007) and that we need to articulate the practicalities of doing participatory design and research in healthcare. To limit the scope we deliberately focus the workshop on the practical implementation of PD prototyping in healthcare. We appoint prototyping a broad definition ranging from the work of cooperative prototyping (Bødker and Grønbæk, 1991) to the actual testing by running the prototype as e.g. software in a healthcare setting. Prototyping thus includes the whole process of e.g. initial participative observations, the creation of early mock-ups, and the iterative co-design and use of prototypes. SCHEDULE The workshop is structured in two parts. In the first part participants present their contribution by giving an overview of specific situations, a layout of the problems and corresponding solutions. Each presentation is followed by a short discussion where key findings and issues are identified for use in part two. After lunch the second part is devoted to collaborative work with the themes emerged in part one. In the end of the second part we draft a first sketch of the booklet. PDC 2010, November 29 – December 3, 2010, Sydney, Australia. Copyright the author(s) Additional copies are available at the ACM Digital Library (http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm) PDC 2010 Proceedings ISBN: x-xxxxx-xxx-x