UPMC Vision and Rehabilitation Environment Research

Inclusivity in health care is a challenge just from the sheer amount of accommodations that have to be made in order for most people to not have a dehumanizing and offensive experience in their day to day lives.

This semester, the CMU School of Design is collaborating with UPMC Enterprises to envision new experiences through communications, products, or environments design at the UPMC Vision and Rehabilitation Center planned to be finished by 2023

From the get-go, the speakers from UPMC categorized inclusivity from numerous perspectives, including physical impairment accommodations to mental disabilities.

And students quickly realized that there was a large mismatch between themselves and people with disabilities. As a designer, this is a barrier difficult to get across, because attempting to empathize can most certainly lead to unintended consequences.

Catherine Getchell Talk Reflection

Director of the Office of Disabilities Resources at Carnegie Mellon University, Catherine Getchell has been dealing with numerous types of disabilities that students deal with alongside their academic challenges.

One of the first thing she mentions is the general lack of awareness that people have about accessibility and the public’s indifference towards people who need such accommodations. Truthfully, I myself didn’t know anything about braille displays and that pdf files for braille displays and voice assistance has to be labeled properly in order to be properly accessible.

The details of life that I have come to assume as givens were not for Catherine. Nonetheless, she went by her lives in other means that are almost telling of how much we can improve the interactions for people with disabilities or more so how much we were indifferent to the perspective of others.

Many times, designers preclude their role as the researcher and maker. But they are also their to understand the different perspectives that make the design challenge so “wicked” in the first place. Catherine’s speech affirmed that innovations are interesting to muse at, but only the design solutions that address a person’s perspective is worthy of usage.

Ashli Molinero Talk Reflection

Ashli’s description of her workplace was demonstrating of the complex systems that are already in place to accommodate and serve people with various kinds of medical needs. In a way, it humbled me and restrained me from jumping into conclusions that might enforce assumptions onto the patients.

She asked the students, “try to evaluate how the spaces are used in different ways.” And she consistently emphasized the importance of engaging with people who share different lifestyles due to their circumstances. Perspectives that are key to this project seemed to be a challenge to investigate espeically because of the COVID-19 cases.

In order for the students to assess what the patients for the new UPMC hospital may need, generating creative methods and tools for the participants to engage in the investigation process is essential. New technologies and facets of health care are emerging and Ashli admits that not all of these toools are qualified to be accessible resources.

One of the problems that emerged through this talk is that the new tools and innovations evolving in healthcare often fail to include features that are accessible for senior citizens, people who are illiterate, etc… It would be interesting to see if designers can research how patients and hospital staffs can communicate simple things through subtle signals like flashes or beepers. Conversely, looking at how patients create new communication tools for health related information.

Rachel Delphia Talk Reflection

Rachel Delphia’s curation of the exhibition “Access+Ability” demonstrates a need for a change in the public’s perspective on physical impairments. Carefully extracting the perspective of the users through the design artifacts and provoking value through how the tools empower users, Rachel helps the audience expand on how to empathize with the users and recognize the changes that are needed in today’s world.

The examples that stuck to my mind were the wheel chairs. The various types of wheel chair designs are specialized to facilitate different experiences challenged me to reconsider what mobility means to different stakeholders. Mobility is one of the “givens” that we have in our everyday lives. Breaking these “givens” helps me identify the opportunities to observe.

While most of the talk was seemingly product oriented, the spectrum of the products that were introduced in the presentation foreshadowed the complexity of the environment that designers would have to navigate and research. It reminded me that it will be important to maintain a clear map of the design narrative and not get lost in trying to solve too many pain points.

Perspectives emerging through speeches

After the guest speakers came to visit our zoom meetings, I endeavors to understand the perspective that the speakers trying to bring about within us. Some focal points that came to my mind were:

Our culture permits defining people with disabilities by their disabilities, a lifestyle with visual impairment opens up a different branch of life that we have yet to understand, and most designers don’t recognize the indifferences in the details of design that are not accessible to people with visual impairments.

I started mind-mapping from the motivation to identify the core experiences that UPMC delivers to its customers. There was already so much information being provided online and talks that had to be interpreted. I decided to grasp onto the idea that hospital visits give physical and emotional certainty to patients.

I applied this core narrative as a lens to everything that I associated with the patients. “How could certainty be metamorphized into an experience that design students can deliver through the resources of UPMC?”

Problem

How can we create a more inclusive health care experience for BLV patients?

Preliminary research demonstrated that there are numerous indicators of health outcomes for BLV patients. Health literacy, however, has one of the strongest correlation to health outcomes and is commonly overlooked by designers.

What Question Are We Trying to Answer?

Lack of health literacy and medical transparency leads to missed opportunities of prevention, higher medical costs, and distrust in the health care system.

Phenomenon

Collecting the Data

Identifying Patterns

Key Insights

Core Value and Impact

Feedback Reflection

Pre-Mid Term Feedback

The first feedback from Daphne, Kristine, and Eric gave us precise advice on making stronger connections when speaking through the research process. Although our group felt that we have done enough to prove our case, the presentation of the slide itself needs more design to communicate the core message of the research.

The lack of specificity in the design proposal due to the scale of the design intervention pulled us back when it came down to communicating our intervention concepts.

Mid Term Feedback

The various approaches and framing of the projects truly illustrated that there are infinite number of ways to interpret a research.

Improved:

• A working approach to the question we are posing
• Acknowledging existing systems to integrate intervention

Needs Improvement:

• Still need to work on making more experiential prototypes
• Disparity in the research and presentation (tighter explanation)

My Thoughts

While there wasn’t as much peer-to-peer feedback as I wanted, the midterm feedback session was a opportunity for me to recognize that design is only an asset for problem solving. I felt like I was bound to a certain definition of design until seeing the different types of approaches that students presented during the feedback session.

Final Reflection

The most intriguing aspect about this project was that we had to design for a user group that has a starkly contrasting definition of positive user experience. To make the situation more challenging, there was no real way to empathize with our users primarily due to the pandemic and the range of potential user scenarios of BLV patients. Sometimes, we heard contradicting statements from participants. Some research participants opposed high-tech solutions, whereas others were either indifferent or eager to adopt new technology. The complexity of information to navigate during the early stages of the project really threw us off and took our group’s exploration and mindset to various places. Later on, our group realized that we should not take every interview or research output at face value. Rather, we tried to read in between the lines and gain insight in why the patient is saying what they are saying, rather than trying to propose a surface-level solution to all the minute discomforts of BLV patients. As the project continued into the mid-term, we were facing more challenges on how to translate our concept into an appropriate form factor. Lauren and I had different interpretations of participant feedback. We shared different social and cultural backgrounds, and our mental models of the hospital system was drastically different from the get-go. Despite these differences in opinion, our group agreed on a conceptual level and decided that our goal is giving “clarity” to the “middle” or “transition” phases in the patient journey. We were able to characterize and define that each user, especially in a patient-hospital setting, perceives proper care as something that provides them with a sense of human presence and empathy. Obviously, there were so many ways to frame this issue and resolve it with a design solution. Our group focused on meticulously outlining how the middle details in the hospital service can be more clearly and appropriately provisioned to UPMC’s patients. Next time, if I were to take on another service design related project- in fact, this is my main design tool and attitude- I would try to work on how our design vision can be most accurately and convincingly communicated to the audience. The difficulty was to make the decisions on what should be included and spoken of within our service blueprint. Our group wanted to cover everything, but there was simply too much to talk about and most of the information may be perceived as redundant if went into great detail. This project sharpened how I would take on design challenges and be more conscious of what we present and showcase to the viewers. Making something appear real is a more challenging task than what I initially thought it would take. The most apparent comment on our project is that our solution may have diverged too much. People wanted exact specifications and narratives. Our group fell short on this, but I believe we made up for it through our design ambition and approach to the prompt itself.