Towards a convergent approach to the use of data in digital health design

Digital health is a vibrant and dynamic field, encompassing subsets such as mobile health, health information technology, wearable devices, telehealth and telemedicine, and personalised medicine. While digital health adoption has been markedly accelerated by the covid-19 pandemic (Inkster et al., 2020), an evolving body of research has focused...

Developing Data-enabled Design in the Field of Digital Health

The research question of this doctoral thesis is: What can be the future impact of design (activities) in digital health, given the rise of data collection and analysis technologies? I answered this question on three knowledge levels: design vision, knowledge-generating approach, and design tool. In Chapter 1, I envision design activities for...

Becoming a design professional through coping with value-based conflicts in collaborative design practice

Junior designers may experience struggles with collaborative partners (e.g clients, managers, and stakeholders) who may prioritise values differently and which may yield frustration, conflict, and stress. Particularly, junior designers may find coping with value-based conflicts challenging as support is lacking. Senior designers can develop...

A Systems Design Approach to Sustainable Development: Embracing the Complexity of Energy Challenges in Low-income Markets

The societal and technical problems faced by low-income markets are increasingly seen as more complex due to environmental, social, and economic concerns. The enormous negative impacts of complex societal problems and the inability of designers to deal with complexity cannot be overcome without a paradigm shift in how we understand, engage with,...

Interface Matters: Postphenomenological Perspectives on Service Design

One of the fundamental questions facing the emerging discipline of service design concerns the definition of its object. In this thesis, I posit that the practice of service design, as a recent development within the tradition of industrial design, may be approached primarily as the design of interfaces between service providers and clients. In...

The strategic relevance of styling and the management of design styles