A design investigation into Emergency Department waiting room futures
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This website forms part of a PhD Exhibition by Troy McGee
Supervisors — Prof. Daphne Flynn, A/Prof. Selby Coxon, Dr. Rowan Page, Dr. Keith Joe
Design Health Collab, Monash University 2020.
What will the Emergency Department (ED) waiting room of the future look like in 2030? 2050? 2100?
How will we experience ‘urgent healthcare’? How will it be delivered, and how might we access it? What are the dilemmas, challenges and opportunities that are afforded by the future? The challenges of the 21st century that are facing the Emergency Department today are significant, and should not be underestimated. New and careful thinking will be required to ensure that these challenges are adequately addressed.
This website presents part of a design practice-led PhD research project which explores the Emergency Department waiting room of the future. Through a series of visualisations, comic-style stories, 3D models and an exhibition-in-a-box, this website asks you to explore this brave new world of urgent care.
While the physical reality of the images, publications and objects contained within this website may give the impression that the future is already fixed, ‘new’ things contain unpredictable potential, often unanticipated even by their inventors. It is up to us – as individuals and citizens – to determine what happens next. While this body of work may suggest a certain future for the Emergency Department, the future reality is not yet determined. The future we get is up to us.
So we ask you – dear viewer – how do you feel about the future of the Emergency Department?
Who is this PhD-study and exhibition for?
This PhD-study, compromised of an exegesis and body of creative work, generates new knowledge to inform the development of new Emergency Department waiting areas, and to complement existing design approaches described in literature and regulatory documentation.
This study is written for two audiences: designers and design researchers interested in health and wellbeing futures; and clinical leaders and healthcare policy advocates who wish to explore how speculative thinking might be applied for the benefit of the organisations that they serve.
Healthcare is undoubtedly complex, and learning even a small part is a significant undertaking. Designers who work in healthcare typically focus their efforts within a single sector – a hospital, information technology (IT), medical devices or service providers (Jones, 2013). This study contributes to this field by exploring the boundaries, overlap and intersection of these sectors and aims to inform the discourse of design research and practice happening in these fields.
Healthcare professionals often also work deeply in one sector as well, focused in a practice and an organisation. This exegesis aims to inform the leaders of those professionals in these sectors about speculative methods, and how these techniques might be applied to help address the many problems that frequent healthcare. This exegesis contributes to the growing discourse about how design can foster collaboration amongst healthcare stakeholders, and the contribution that the field of design might make to materialising future healthcare experiences - both inside and outside the ED.
This website features the creative work generated throughout the PhD-study, and should be read in conjunction with the exegesis, which is included within this website.