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Design Jam Care4Balance

20-06-2014

Saturday, June 14th, the Digital Life group organized together with Amsterdam Creative Industries Centre of Expertise and designjams.org a Design Jam. 25 national and international designers gathered at studio HvA for a design jam on health. The goal was to experience the entire design cycle for ICT systems that improve (informal) care. The design challenge was to balance the workload between formal and informal healthcare workers and to emphasize the reciprocity of care: a person is not only patient or caregiver but can, at the same time, need care and provide proper assistance.

The participants started at 9:00 pm under the guidance of experienced mentors and worked in teams to explore the issue. The required knowledge of the needs of the care was provided by students of the minor Care Technology and staff care organization Amsta. This resulted around lunchtime in descriptions of persona and tentative concepts.

These concepts were evaluated during the afternoon with the help of a lot of sticky notes, sketches and role plays. Four concepts were presented with great enthusiasm. Innovative solutions were presented such as intelligent signs at the grocery store where people can offer their skills and expertise, and apps that help the sportive biker not only to build a good condition, but also to run some errants for elderly on the way.

The results of the design will be made available via the website http://designjams.org under a Creative Commons license. In addition, the results are used within the European AAL Care4Balance project (http://www.digitallifecentre.nl/projecten/care4balance) that focuses on better balancing caring for formal informal caregivers using ICT.