From Empathy to Action: Design Thinking as a Catalyst for Community-Based Participatory Research in Dementia Caregiving.

This article delves into the understudied realm of investigating the potential benefits of integrating design thinking into community-based participatory research within the context of culturally diverse dementia caregivers. Following the Double-Diamond process model, we conducted a series of workshops with 15 family caregivers of dementia patients from three distinct communities (multi-racial, Black, and Latino ethnicity) to gain insights into their daily experiences and co-create interventions that could address their pressing challenges. The research question for this study aimed to explore the potential benefits of design thinking in community-based research on dementia caregiving. Our findings contribute to the health design community by demonstrating the potential of design thinking to 1) uncover common and distinct challenges in diverse communities, 2) translate findings into actionable solutions, and 3) design tailored interventions that are responsive to the context-specific needs of the community. Our study leads us to conclude that the integration of design thinking as a catalyst in community-based participatory research has the potential to amplify the identification of nuanced and previously unexamined challenges through empathetic exploration, and to propose innovative interventions that are more amenable to uptake and acceptance within the community.

Exploring the value of multi-sensory aids in co-designing assistive home devices for older adults with cognitive impairment.

In this study, we aimed to investigate the benefits of co-design prompts/aids in the development of assistive devices for and with older adults who have cognitive impairment (CI), with the goal of improving their ability to live independently at home. We conducted a series of co-design workshops and utilized eight sets of multi-sensory aids to explore their values and effectiveness in engaging older adults with CI in co-design processes. Our findings revealed that the co-design aids had several benefits, including: (1) increasing the exchange of knowledge and awareness between older adults and designers; (2) eliciting insightful information through multi-sensorial aids, and (3) generating novel assistive design solutions to support seniors' independent living at home. We discuss our findings in relation to the multi-sensorial attributes of co-design aids, which empower older adults with CI to express their opinions and actively participate in co-designing assistive devices that meet their needs/expectations.

Collective making: Co-designing 3D printed assistive technologies with occupational therapists, designers, and end-users.

In this study, we conducted four participatory workshops to facilitate co-designing 12 writing assistive technology (AT) interventions with occupational therapists, industrial designers, and an end-user with physical impairments. We observed participants' activities during the workshops and held a post-workshop follow-up reflection session where we invited the OTs and the end-user to share their experience about the co-design activities and co-created devices. The study findings revealed characteristics of the clinical-technical-individual co-design contributions that are conducive to the collective making of usable and useful AT prototypes. We propose CoDEA (Codesigning Assistive Technologies), a potential framework that offers to follow four stages of co-experimentation, co-development, co-evaluation, and co-refinement and define specific roles and activities of OT-designer-user in each step to co-design 3D printed ATs successfully. We recommend utilizing a comprehensive approach to co-designing ATs by using prototyping toolkits/3D printing together with a designerly way of thinking to achieve state-of-the-art AT solutions.

Training Clinical Researchers with Design Thinking to To Develop Dementia Caregiving Research Initiatives.

Training healthcare professionals with Design Thinking (DT) can support patient-centred care by recognizing patient/care provider needs through empathizing. This article explored the Design Thinking in improving clinical researchers' understanding of relatively unexplored and understudied dementia caregiving problems. Following the Double-Diamond, a Design Thinking process model, we conducted a series of workshops and invited family caregivers of patients with dementia as active participants to provide training to clinical researchers on Design Thinking. We then evaluated the benefit of the workshops in improving clinical researchers' understanding of the caregiving problem and solution space through pre- and post-surveys. Our findings revealed researchers' overall perception of Design Thinking, their clear insights on dementia caregivers' challenges, and speculating caregiver-specific interventions. Our paper contributed to the health design community by exploring the benefit of Design Thinking in understudied areas by 1) Recognizing urgent matters in healthcare, 2) Revealing implicit needs through collective expertise and knowledge exchange, and 3) Producing original health care research and contributions. We hope this study inspires and supports training healthcare researchers to advance dementia caregiving and healthcare research initiatives by adopting the Double-Diamond process model.