Peter Pennefather, West Suhanic, Katie Seaborn and Deb Fels
We have suggested elsewhere that technology, systems, and services designed for human use in pursuing the “good life” should consider states of eudaimonic flourishing as well as hedonic pleasure as design goals, along with traditional ergonomic factors. Here we consider how eudaimonic systemic design principles can be applied to the design challenge of creating a personal health record (PHR) system that can be owned and managed by the person the record is about. We develop an idea of a record that links the person’s self‐reported experience of eudaimonic flourishing to electronic medical records of a system’s perspective on that person’s health. The idea is to create a record for guiding salutogenesis despite a complex chronic care condition that is episodically disabling like incurable chronic pain. Using the concept of nourishment as an analogy, we advance the concept of flourishment. We define a systemic design framework for a PHR domain that can host a personal record of eudaimonic flourishment and engaged resilience (a PREFER domain). That domain needs to track personally experienced consequences of the outputs of specific healthcare system services in terms of their impact in driving a virtuous cycle of flourishment. We take the position that eudaimonic flourishing is essentially a sense‐making process, and discuss the overlap between the concepts of well‐being and of eudaimonic flourishing. (217).
