Design for Sustainable Healthcare

Developmental design for systemic wicked problems (2022-2023)

Healthcare services are the source of significant unsustainable environmental threats. The increasing impacts of energy and material use, global supply chains and toxic waste streams of healthcare systems contribute to massive environmental impacts, including non-recyclable landfill waste, toxic chemical and plastics waste in land and water flows, and greenhouse gas emissions. Recent events of the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing natural disasters around the world and an acknowledgement of climate change as a global challenge have escalated the conversations among healthcare policy-makers towards mitigating the environmental impacts of the healthcare industry. With an increasing demand for healthcare services from both modernizing and ageing populations worldwide, a vicious cycle of healthcare for individual patients at the cost of the health of entire populations is observed, causing moral and ethical tensions in the operation of health systems and the provision of health-related services in a responsible manner

This project illustrates a systemic design approach to unveil the complexities in healthcare sustainability interventions. A participatory design workshop was conducted with design experts in healthcare and sustainability at a symposium using three different systemic design tools to map the stakeholders involved, the context of healthcare sustainability and potential leverage points for intervening in such complex systems. The workshop produced five representations that visualize the actors of the system, the context in which they operate, and the areas of intervention towards reducing the environmental impact of these systems. Through the use of systemic design tools, the project proposes a developmental design approach to build a long-term design research agenda to study and advise healthcare services towards meeting sustainability challenges.

The project applies principles of systemic design to the complex socio-technical problem of sustainable healthcare to tease out a long-term agenda for research through design in the form of developmental design. The project contributes to interdisciplinary knowledge across systemic design, developmental design and design for sustainable healthcare.


Publications

Jones P., Arun Kumar P. (2021). Systemic Design for Healthcare Sustainability: Patients, Consumers and “Big Box” Healthcare (Workshop), Related Systems thinking and Design Symposium (RSD10) Delft, Netherlands, 3rd–6th Nov. https://rsdsymposium.org/systemic-design-for-healthcare-sustainability-patients-consumers-and-big-box-healthcare/