Design to Care: Education Experiences to design local healthcare services

This paper shares the educational experience at a Product Design Studio of the International Master of Science in Product Design at the Sapienza University of Rome. The course was organized as research work in the field of Design for Healthcare applied to education, using the Design Studio as a case-study. In particular, the research has evidenced the potential of design to bring improvements to the sector thanks to its creative and divergent thinking. Thus, the aim of the course was to transmit to the students the skills useful for achieving a Service and Social Innovation in the field of Healthcare. Specifically, the students were asked to develop a Design Proposal of a product/service that would provide a new User Experience for the local healthcare services (a Pediatric Emergency Room) by taking into consideration its social, economic and technological long-term sustainability. In order to reach that goal, the didactic activities were organized as a three-step process: ‘to Research’, ‘to Design’, and ‘to Develop’. Each step had its own tools and deliverables, such as the Conceptual Maps, the User Experience tools, the Systemic Innovation Diagram, and the Business Model Canvas, and the s Technique that was applied for the first time at this course as a design method. These tools and techniques supported students in learning, thinking, analyzing, understanding, and evaluating their works. The course finalized at a set of Design Proposals demonstrating the improvement of the Healthcare services and the possible new behaviors of its users.