Yuanrong Guo, Sarah Kettley, and Autumn Roesch-Marsh
Designers are increasingly involved in complex healthcare projects that extend beyond products or interfaces to services, organisations, technologies, and the relationships between them. In response to this growing complexity, systems thinking has become more influential in design, particularly through the development of systemic design methods, frameworks and tools. Yet design practice in complex healthcare settings involves more than applying formal methods. Designers work through uncertainty, organisational constraints, stakeholder negotiations and shifting project conditions in highly situated ways, and these aspects of practice have received less attention than the methods themselves.
This PhD examines how designers work within complex healthcare design projects and asks how the findings may inform understandings of systems thinking in design. Practice theory provides the analytical lens. The empirical inquiry centres on project-based interviews with design practitioners, with possible case extensions and reflection workshops. The research aims to develop an empirically grounded, practice-oriented account of systems thinking in healthcare design.
Keywords: healthcare complexity, systems thinking, systemic design, practice theory, design practice