Tangible Care: Design as a Vehicle for Materializing Shifting Relationships between Clinicians and Patients

This paper explores a collaboration between a hospital and a design team working on shared decision making. The analysis shows that designers have materialized care on different levels. One concerns the combination of top-down and bottom-up stakeholder input, in other words the representation of voices that are not equally equipped with power. By evidence of our research we argue that designers’ main cultural achievement lies in an illustration of a currently changing medical practice with shifting roles for ‘modern’ patients and clinicians. Thus the main outcome of the design process is a re-organization of the relationship between patients and clinicians.