Design Perspectives on Digital Health

This conversation-based workshop marks the concluding moment of the MAKEAWARE!-Spearhead initiative. The format is designed to foster interdisciplinary exchange, combining perspectives from design research, health practice, and technology development. Engaging in dialogue, the seminar aims to refine the MAKEAWARE! outcomes, enrich design research with diverse perspectives, and identify new areas for collaboration in digital healthcare.

The seminar is structured as a full-day activity to share project results and open an interdisciplinary dialogue with experts and students. In the morning session, the MAKEAWARE! team will present outcomes from three years of research, including stories collected through the digital story-collection tool, which captures patient experiences of antibiotic use. These materials will serve as a starting point for a discussion with invited experts, who will be asked to evaluate the approach and provide feedback on data collection methods and their potential adoption in healthcare design.

In the afternoon session, experts from international institutions—including Arthi Manohar (Brunel University London), Aylin Tschoepe (Basel Academy of Art and Design, MetaLab Basel), Laura Ferrarello (EPFL Lausanne), Teresa Almeida (Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon), Sara Levati (Department of Business Economics, Health and Social Care, SUPSI), and Paulina Yurman (University of the Arts London)—will present their projects in design and healthcare. Each presentation will illustrate how data is defined, collected, visualised, or used in prototyping, offering students and participants insights into real-world applications of design research. The session is open to students of the Master in Interaction Design as well as colleagues from architecture, visual communication, engineering, and related fields.

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The seminar was chaired by Serena Cangiano, project leader and senior research associate at the SUPSI Design Institute, together with Ginevra Terenghi, doctoral student at SUPSI and Brunel University. In the morning, the invited researchers joined the discussion on the project’s results, and in the afternoon they presented their own work before engaging in an open dialogue with the public. The contributors included:

→ Arthi Manohar is a Senior Lecturer and Director of BSc Product Design at Brunel Design School. Her research explores the intersection of social design and technology, with a focus on participatory and user-centered design. Arthi’s work addresses complex socio-digital challenges, from designing for trust to embedding human values in digital systems. She is also an active contributor to the HCI research community and serves as the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Leas for the Brunel Design School.

→ Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe is a design anthropologist, founder of metaLAB (at) Basel, and professor at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW. With a background spanning anthropology, architecture, gender and urban studies, her work bridges disciplines to explore themes such as care, migration, posthuman collaboration, and urban transformation. As head of research in designXsciences, she leads collaborative projects at the intersection of design, technology, life and social sciences. She also edits the Urban Anthropology Unbound series, championing experimental and multimodal ethnographic approaches.

→ Laura Ferrarello is a Design Researcher and Academic. She teaches at the EPFL Doctoral School the course “The Practice of Ethics in Engineering Research and Practice. Her work explores how design can foster dialogue between technology, society, and the environment, with a focus on ethics, governance, and complexity. Previously, she led the Master in Design Research at the Royal College of Art. Laura’s practice uses design as a tool for systemic change, promoting ethical innovation through dialogue and interdisciplinary collaboration.

→ Teresa Almeida is an Assistant Professor at Técnico University of Lisbon and a research member at the Interactive Technologies Institute/LARSyS. Her interdisciplinary, design-led research explores human-data interaction and social justice informatics, with a focus on intimate data and marginalised communities. Drawing from human-computer interaction (HCI), feminist social and technology studies (STS), and craft-based practices, she creates interventions that blend materiality, interaction, and technology to reimagine inclusive futures.

→ Paulina Yurmane is a Research Fellow, designer and lecturer at Central Saint Martins in London. She is the recipient of a Wellcome research grant for her 4-year long project Maternal Machines: Design Speculations about Fantasies of Care, which investigates future imaginaries of maternal and infant care and looks to identify opportunities for wellbeing. Her research blends critical design with speculative methods to question and reimagine our relationships with technology. Her work often critically explores how we live with design and technology in everyday life.

→ Sara Levati is a Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Nursing Science at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI). With a background in nursing, her teaching and research focus on developing solutions for effective home-based care, designing interventions to improve patient health and well-being, and integrating advanced technologies into home care to optimize service delivery. An experienced qualitative researcher, she leads interdisciplinary projects with a strong emphasis on user involvement.

resources

↗ Activity organisation page
↗ Event poster