Probing the Future of Participatory Healthcare through Speculative Design

The aim of this paper is to initiate an interdisciplinary exchange between healthcare and participatory speculative design in order to better understand how patients’ self-management may be integrated into future healthcare services. In the paper we introduce a speculative prototype – the Patient Empowerment Kit – that has been co-designed with cancer patients and informed by a number of self-management strategies that these patients have used to cope with their life-threatening disease. In additional ethnographic field studies, Danish health professionals have been invited to use the Kit as a way to gain knowledge about patients’ self-management and to co-speculate about alternate futures. The contribution of the paper is two-fold: First, we demonstrate how speculative design has a participatory potential to involve health professionals in rehearsing near mundane futures. Secondly, we provide a new frame of analysis that enables design researchers to evaluate empirical material gathered from using speculative prototypes in healthcare.