Co-Designing a children’s garments for surgery

Abstract

This report is an account of the graduation project executed by Thomas Latcham for the Wilhelmina Kinderziekenhuis (WKZ) in Utrecht, concluding his master degree in Design for Interaction at the Delft University of Technology. The goal of the project was to design a new garment for the pediatric patients in the hospital to wear when undergoing surgery by involving these patients throughout the design process. The initial design goal was to design a new garment that was comfortable, fashionable and privacy-respecting, while remaining functionally operable for the hospital staff, in occurrence with all the stakeholders demands and wishes. Internal and external analyses were done to identify the trends in the domain of healthcare, the legal aspects relating to the matter, the current garments and the competitors and alternatives, and the strengths and weaknesses of the WKZ. These analyses showed that designing a new product for the field was indeed viable. A stakeholder analysis within the hospital showed the complexity of the domain and confirmed two user groups: the patients: wearing the garments, and the staff: confronted with the garments. In observations and interviews, the staff’s functional requirements were pinpointed. In a first generative session with children, an elaborate patient journey and a clear problem statement regarding the current garments were formulated. Furthermore, most importantly, the patients’ emotional needs were identified, resulting in a more specific design goal: design an outfit that gives the patients a sense of control, ownership, safety and assurance, while meeting the staff’s functional requirements. In a second round of generative sessions, children in and outside of the hospital were asked to make garments in 2D and 3D to meet this new design goal. The output of this session served as input for the first sketches. These sketches were combined and clustered resulting in three concepts, which were evaluated by the patients in a third generative session. The three concepts were attempts to answer the emotional needs of the patients, and they were combined to form a new concept after the third session. There was however no physical design of a garment yet to underline the concepts. Therefore, the staff was involved in a series of feedback sessions, in which they were shown early prototypes and ideas for garments and asked to provide feedback. This resulted in a design matching the staff’s functional requirements as well as the combined concept, that answered the patients’ emotional needs. In a fourth round of generative sessions, the combined concept and an early prototype of the physical design were evaluated by the patients. The outcomes of this round of sessions provided input for the modification and detailing of the concept as a whole, resulting in the final design. This final design was user tested in a fifth round of user involvement, in which the final design was evaluated on the patients’ emotional needs as well as the staff’s functional requirements. In a final, sixth session, all identified stakeholders were invited to a presentation of the new design in the WKZ. The outcomes of the fifth and sixth sessions were used to evaluate the final design and the co-design process and to formulate recommendations for the final design, towards implementation in the future.