industry & reform
Better by design
Using cross-cultural collaboration and ‘ design thinking ’ to innovate in aged care .
Lisa Scharoun interviewed by Eleanor Campbell
Innovation and co-design in aged care delivery is a key solution to addressing the needs of the global ageing population , according to researchers .
Cross-Cultural Design for Healthy Ageing , published earlier this year , reports on a series of workshops involving university students and academics from Australia , China , Singapore , Hong Kong and Taiwan .
Students from nursing , design , film and media schools travelled to major urban cities to co-design projects , services and campaigns in aged care residential homes , hospitals and community housing precincts .
Lead editor and co-author Dr Lisa Scharoun , from the University of Technology Queensland , said the workshops encouraged students to transcend their different disciplines to produce new solutions for healthy ageing .
She spoke with Nursing Review about ‘ design thinking ’ and the power of cross-cultural collaboration in moving the aged care sector forward .
NR : How did the idea for the book and the workshops come about ? LS : The idea started with a grassroots initiative at the University of Canberra
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called InnovAGE , which was an ageing innovation workshop that brought people from government and academics together to come up with new solutions to different issues in that sector . Through that , our design team came up with a lot of really interesting ideas that ended up winning some of the top prizes . And I thought this would be an amazing opportunity to run something like this with students .
So I took that idea further . I ’ d been running a series of study tours to China and Japan , but that was more around industrial and design teaching practise and looking at product design and cultural exploration . So I thought I switch the focus of the tours to design for healthy ageing . I had some very close contact with colleagues in nursing who were really keen on the idea too , to bring their students to learn about how they could be influential in the design process .
It then grew into this multi-year , government-funded study tour to Singapore and institutional partnerships with places in Hong Kong and Taiwan , and many different partnerships with the hospitals and care homes in Singapore that evolved over time .
What role did the nursing students play in the workshops ? The nursing students engaged in the entire process with us . The first part of the tour would be a cultural briefing . We ’ d bring students to a cultural immersion experience at different museums and sites so they could understand the cultural contexts in Singapore . And then we would bring them together with students from nursing and design at an institution in Singapore . So they were working crossculturally with other students who had Singaporean and Chinese backgrounds .
Within those workshops we taught all of the students the design thinking process of how to approach issues in a global context . And then we would run through activities like a day in the life , which gets students to think about stepping into the shoes of someone in an aged care facility .
We ’ d run different types of experiences with them where we would simulate ageing . So we used mobility aids , students had to wear glasses that were a bit fogged over , and we constricted their hands to have the feeling of arthritis and different things like that . And then students would have to navigate around in teams . After we immersed them in that type of experience , we brought them to care homes .
The first tour that we brought nursing students on was more of an observation . So students went to different care homes across the island and hospitals , and they didn ’ t talk to any patients or residents . But in the second year we integrated interviews into it and real participatory design . So we actually had residents in care homes and patients in hospitals speak to us and the students interviewed them to understand their experience in those facilities .
What were the different perceptions of ageing held by the students ? The Singaporean students had a completely different understanding of what