Reflexive practice in interdisciplinary design of pervasive health applications in dementia care

Interdisciplinary design is essential to create new pervasive health applications, in our case those for dementia care, and to innovate our healthcare systems to meet the challenges of ongoing demographic changes. While interdisciplinary design is gaining attention in HCI literature and challenges of managing and executing interdisciplinary design projects are brought to the fore, few guidelines are provided to deal with these challenges. Often published outcomes focus on the innovative solutions and describe the design process merely on a high level. However, factors that led to a certain design outcome, such as the politics of participation, power relations, understandings and negotiations of concepts, choice of settings and materials for design workshops, decisions for one design, and more importantly against another, are “black-boxed”. To open the black-box and understand what kind of knowledge from who for whom and why has been created and whether and how it can be transferred to new design contexts, requires to make the above named factors visible – in publications but also during the design process. To that end we suggest a reflexive approach to interdisciplinary design through value sensitive design methods and real-time ethnographic practices.