Abstract
This paper examines how systemic designers in health navigate plural perspectives and overlapping quality regimes. We introduce the Playground of Design as four interconnected spaces of problem, design, change, and solution, together with four R’s, Rapidness, Rigour, Relevance, and Resonance, as conversational lenses for articulating design rationale in plural settings. Two Dutch cases illustrate this approach. Bias Blaster, a serious game for adolescents recovering from psychosis, is reread retrospectively to reconstruct systemic design rationale. E-Health Junior, a long-running e-health consortium, is reconstructed through interviews and translated into a pedagogical workshop for perspective-taking. We argue that combining the Playground of Design with the four R’s helps make systemic design rationale more explicit and discussable, enabling designers and educators to engage plural quality regimes without flattening their differences.
Keywords
Systemic design; design rationale; design education; health
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2657
Citation
Wartena, B., and Kuipers, D. (2026) The R’s Have It: Navigating the Playground of Design for Health through Design Rationale, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2657
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
The R’s Have It: Navigating the Playground of Design for Health through Design Rationale
This paper examines how systemic designers in health navigate plural perspectives and overlapping quality regimes. We introduce the Playground of Design as four interconnected spaces of problem, design, change, and solution, together with four R’s, Rapidness, Rigour, Relevance, and Resonance, as conversational lenses for articulating design rationale in plural settings. Two Dutch cases illustrate this approach. Bias Blaster, a serious game for adolescents recovering from psychosis, is reread retrospectively to reconstruct systemic design rationale. E-Health Junior, a long-running e-health consortium, is reconstructed through interviews and translated into a pedagogical workshop for perspective-taking. We argue that combining the Playground of Design with the four R’s helps make systemic design rationale more explicit and discussable, enabling designers and educators to engage plural quality regimes without flattening their differences.