Christa van Gessel and Remko van der Lugt
In systemic co-design collaborations, healthcare professionals and designers intend to work together towards solutions for complex societal issues. However, this collaboration often struggles. In this study, we attempted to answer the research question: What barriers do healthcare professionals and designers encounter in their collaboration in systemic co-design, and what are ways to negotiate these barriers? Through a retrospective multiple-case study of three two-year design research projects in the domain of physical therapy, we identified four principal uncertainties as barriers: uncertainty about the process and method (plan); uncertainty about their roles; uncertainty about the content; and uncertainty about the goal and outcome. For each uncertainty, we reflect on what helped in order to scale the barrier. These uncertainties can be understood as caused by the fact that systemic co-design requires acting into a space between problem and solution, between abstract and concrete, and between practice and theory. We refer to this as moving in a conceptual space by being able to utilise intermediate knowledge.
Keywords: systemic co-design, healthcare, complexity, uncertainty, intermediate knowledge, conceptual space