A joint proposal by the Laboratory of Design Production and Management and the Center for Visualization and Simulation in Construction, University of Twente.
By Mascha van der Voort, Timo Hartmann, and Geert Dewulf
Health care facilities evolve constantly. They not only need to be renovated, but also adjusted to the constantly changing health care standards, health related policies, and newly available technical innovations. Additionally, the increasing need for capacity caused by an aging population and new diseases requires constant extensions of existing health care facilities. Overall, evolutionary adjustments to existing health care facilities are frequently required that range from the re-design of medical devices and single spaces, such as operating arenas, to the integration of completely new building extensions to existing health care facilities.
Designing such new evolutionary adjustment of facilities is not an easy task because of the large amount of stakeholders that designers need to integrate in the design process. Designers need to optimize designs according to stringent financial requirements of health care administrations, and operational requirements of doctors. Additionally, because of the increasing market orientation of health care providers, designers need to increasingly account for patient wishes, needs, and requirements. Finally, many different technical disciplines are involved during evolutionary hospital re-design activities, ranging from medical equipment providers to architects and builders.
Participatory design is an approach that aims at actively involving all these stakeholders in the design process as co-designers. In this way, the participatory design approach has the potential to support efforts to design health care facilities that finally meet the needs of all stakeholders and are usable by everybody. Unfortunately, it is still a very tedious and time consuming task to establish the mutual understanding about a design task among all stakeholders that is required for truly participatory design activities. In particular, has it been exceptionally hard to allow stakeholders without a design or technical background to understand a design task in sufficient depth to allow for active participation. To ease this process of establishing mutual understanding of a design task, (Virtual) Gaming technologies have proven to be a very effective tool. Previous studies have shown that state-of-the-art visualization and simulation tools can create a quick and mutual understanding about complex issues. Early experiments of the Laboratory of Design Production and Management and the Center for Visualization and Simulation in Construction have already hinted to the vast possibilities that such Virtual Gaming technologies offer.
To move this area of research beyond these initial experiments and to gain an in depth and generalizable understanding about the possibilities of Virtual Gaming technologies to support Health Care facility design, we started a research effort centered around a Ph.D. student that is jointly supervised by the Laboratory of Design Production and Management and the Center for Visualization and Simulation in Construction. This research setup allows us to explore how virtual gaming technologies can enable participatory design efforts on different levels starting from a micro view of medical devices, to interior design of specific rooms and facility wings, to the design of health care facilities itself. We expect that this research will yield highly significant theoretical research results that we plan to publish in recognized scientific journals. Next to these theoretical results, we also expect that this research will yield applicable practical guidelines and supporting simulation and visualization technologies that will allow the direct application of the theoretical results in practical Health Care design settings.
Status: This is the PhD Research brief that I’m involved right now (2011 – 2015).