Design for Health Care

Today’s healthcare system is permeated with design questions: To what extent does the spatial environment contribute to patient ag-gression? How can people with dementia better orient themselves in the hospital? How can communication between nurses and foreign-language patients be improved? Or: How must an intensive care unit be designed to support staff’s work processes? In order to be able to answer these complex questions, knowledge and competences from different fields are needed.

The lecture will give an overview of evidence-based design in health contexts and show how interprofessional collaboration between re-searchers from different fields, such as design, architecture and nurs-ing can work. It will address both the potential and challenges of in-terdisciplinary research using concrete project examples. At the newly founded Swiss Center for Design and Health (SCDH), knowledge and research competences of different disciplines are used to answer complex questions in healthcare and to come up with innovative solu-tions.