Care Lab & Dissdeo — Redesigning Care — Ageable

ageable
4 min readDec 9, 2020

As part of the Designer in Residency Programme that we are hosting together with Eric Kihlstrom from the Aging 2.0 Network to learn all about how design can help you take your idea/project/business to the next stage.

Our last session we were super happy to be welcoming the fabulous Hannah Bruce and Harriett Ackers from Dissideo, Lekshmy Parameswaran, László Herczeg from Care Lab. Care Lab shared with us their work around their Hospitable Hospice Project. If you want to learn more about the project specifically — you can read their inspiring report here where they radically re-imagined what it meant to be in a hospice.

Dissideo brought their challenge which we framed as ‘How can we design a great welcoming experience for new residents’. A common challenge from many care home settings — but it was great to be able to have care labs, as well as the attendees ideas on how we can do this truly differently as part of the Dissideo ideas. Together with Care Lab, and the attendees of the session, we shaped our ideal journey as if we were ‘imaging how it would feel to look around a home for a parent?’. We were overwhelmed by ideas- it took me about 1/2 a day to pull them all together to share!

In order to develop ideas — we sliced the opportunities into different possible experience slices:

What we would do AFTER a session like this — would be to go through and prioritise which of these might start to make up the Dissideo experience and create their experience DNA.

The best opportunities and ideas would be prototyped as a way of playing out and imagining in real life how this experience could play out in the real world. All ideas can sound great on paper — but the real crucial test is to prototype a selection of those so that we can ensure that we trial this out in order to understand what works and what doesn’t.

Designers iteratively test ideas, so every time we learn, adapt and try again. This capacity to trial things and ‘can do attitude’ early is critical to ensure that we fail early — not when it’s too late, and the first resident is walking in. These then in the delivery phase become service blueprints. This would become your service DNA, and help you translate the ethos of Dissideo into service principles that can then help you map each part of a service experience — The welcoming part being just the beginning — of a more complex picture. Just like Care Lab showed us with their Hospitable Hospice work. Ideas that had been co-created with their customers then became the essence of their service strategy going forwards.

What we would do AFTER a session like this — would be to go through and prioritise which of these might start to make up the Dissideo experience and create their experience DNA.

The best opportunities and ideas would be prototyped as a way of playing out and imagining in real life how this experience could play out in the real world. All ideas can sound great on paper — but the real crucial test is to prototype a selection of those so that we can ensure that we trial this out in order to understand what works and what doesn’t.

Designers iteratively test ideas, so every time we learn, adapt and try again. This capacity to trial things and ‘can do attitude’ early is critical to ensure that we fail early — not when it’s too late, and the first resident is walking in. These then in the delivery phase become service blueprints. This would become your service DNA, and help you translate the ethos of Dissideo into service principles that can then help you map each part of a service experience — The welcoming part being just the beginning — of a more complex picture. Just like Care Lab showed us with their Hospitable Hospice work. Ideas that had been co-created with their customers then became the essence of their service strategy going forwards.

Originally published at https://www.ageable.org on December 9, 2020.

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ageable

We use imagination & creativity to re-design the way we live, age & care. www.ageable.org