Search

Medicalization refers to the process by which ordinary human problems and experiences—such as depression, anxiety, addiction, and child hyperactivity—come to be defined and treated as distinct medical conditions. The growing influence of Western medicine (or 'biomedicine') in contemporary society has had a profound impact on people's understanding of what it means to be 'normal', how they conceptualize and respond to illness, and perhaps even their understanding of life itself. Despite the increasing number of products, services, and interventions that extend the reach of medicine into everyday life, the concept of medicalization has received surprisingly little attention in the design literature. This article presents a single case study, a web design project called 'Living Well with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI)', to provoke discussion around how design processes and practices are sometimes embroiled in the construction of new medical diagnoses, and the implications this might have for the emerging field of design for health. The research found that the website helped legitimize the MCI diagnosis by giving it form, despite ongoing debates about its use and validity in clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contextualises the emergence and continuing development of the Design for Health and Wellbeing (DHW) Lab, a collaboration between a university and a hospital in Auckland, New Zealand. The DHW Lab was established with the vision of creating a design space in which designers, students, patients and hospital staff could work together to identify and address contemporary healthcare issues in innovative ways. In this paper, we explain how the continuing development of the space reflects the design principles it espouses, and how this is embedding design principles and practices into a healthcare organisation. In particular, we will show how the users of the space contribute to the evolution of its physical appearance, its values and its performance as they come to identify and make sense of the challenges, possibilities and potential of the DHW Lab initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper will present a design anthropological perspective on an ongoing project called 'Living Well with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI)'. The project explores how people with MCI (and their families) manage and respond to changes in their memory and thinking. One of the primary aims of this project is to design an online resource that will support people to 'Live Well' within the context of possible cognitive decline. The resource was originally proposed to function as a kind of online community, where users could both share and learn about homegrown strategies for managing the cognitive changes associated with MCI in everyday life. Much of this project has been guided by the methodological approach of design anthropology, which encourages project researchers and stakeholders to critically examine underlying assumptions and conceptual frameworks, which in this case revolve around the disputed MCI category. In this paper we will provide some background to the Living Well project before highlighting a number of key insights attained from design anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]