Abstract
What will the Emergency Department (ED) of the future look like in 2030? 2050? 2100?
How will we experience ‘urgent healthcare’? How will it be delivered, and how might we access it? What are the dilemmas, challenges and opportunities that are afforded by the future? This poster presents a practice-led PhD which aims to explore the ED of the future and focuses on the ED waiting room (EDWR). This project interrogates how technology might impact the experience of care in the EDWR, and how design practice might be applied in order to explore the scale of this impact.
This paper presents a comic-strip style design fiction of an alternative future for the EDWR, typified by automation, a digitally connected world and artificial intelligence. While this narrative is fictional, the injury and background of the characters is based on real, contemporary ED experiences observed within the PhD project. This story asks us to probe the possibilities, uncertainties and challenges of the future in the context of the ED, and the possible resultant care experience.
This paper then concludes by analysing this future narrative through a series of ‘lenses’, focal points where we might explore the pertinent issues and scale of the impact from political, economic, social and technological forces. In doing so, this paper aims to encourage meaningful discussion about the most desirable experience in the EDWR.
Keywords
emergency department waiting room, speculative service design, speculative design, service design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/servdes2020.30
Citation
McGee, T., Flynn, D., Coxon, S.,and Page, R.(2021) Emergency Department futures: a design investigation into ED waiting rooms, in Akama, Y., Fennessy, L., Harrington, S., & Farago, A. (eds.), ServDes 2020: Tensions, Paradoxes and Plurality, 2–5 February 2021, Melbourne, Australia. https://doi.org/10.21606/servdes2020.30
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Papers
Emergency Department futures: a design investigation into ED waiting rooms
What will the Emergency Department (ED) of the future look like in 2030? 2050? 2100?
How will we experience ‘urgent healthcare’? How will it be delivered, and how might we access it? What are the dilemmas, challenges and opportunities that are afforded by the future? This poster presents a practice-led PhD which aims to explore the ED of the future and focuses on the ED waiting room (EDWR). This project interrogates how technology might impact the experience of care in the EDWR, and how design practice might be applied in order to explore the scale of this impact.
This paper presents a comic-strip style design fiction of an alternative future for the EDWR, typified by automation, a digitally connected world and artificial intelligence. While this narrative is fictional, the injury and background of the characters is based on real, contemporary ED experiences observed within the PhD project. This story asks us to probe the possibilities, uncertainties and challenges of the future in the context of the ED, and the possible resultant care experience.
This paper then concludes by analysing this future narrative through a series of ‘lenses’, focal points where we might explore the pertinent issues and scale of the impact from political, economic, social and technological forces. In doing so, this paper aims to encourage meaningful discussion about the most desirable experience in the EDWR.