Warm Solutions: Medical Making & Collaborative Infrastructure for Care
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Tattamangalam Ananthanarayanan, Udaya Lakshmi
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Abstract
Making, as an activity and culture, enables people to participate in technological innovation at non-traditional sites. In healthcare settings, medical makers undertake activities as a part of routine, professional care practice. Their collaborative process occurs at the intersection of centralized healthcare systems and decentralized maker technologies with reflexive opportunities for human-centered design. In my research, I propose a critical view of medical making as an opportunity to reposition the power to participate in design within traditional healthcare practice. I develop my thesis from multiple efforts in a wide ecosystem of medical makers across private and public practice, STEM institutions, academic research labs, and non-profit groups. I apply Science and Technology Studies (STS) and HCI theories to analyze stakeholder efforts in relation to long-term patient-centered care infrastructure.
Embedded in practice, infrastructure becomes visible in relation to its use. In my dissertation, I develop an understanding of how stakeholders in healthcare settings and networks influence care infrastructure with maker technologies. I do this by foregrounding the norms, values, and expertise related to stakeholder participation across three sections. First, I re-locate the site where physician-led making begins from labs to the bedside – as safe, reliable, small-scale prototypes. Second, I re-frame the importance of medical making, with lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, when grassroot- and institutional makers repaired temporary manufacturing breakdowns by creating reliable medical supplies. Third, I re-center the role of point-of-care medical makers, highlighting present-day nurse contributions as makers and contrasting their historically undocumented contributions in routine care. My research work culminates in a discussion of the human infrastructure, in addition to information systems, required to design environments for innovation based on the case study of medical making. For HCI researchers, this work first diversifies design values of novelty to include healthcare values of safety, reliability, and verifiability in collaborative systems, and second, extrapolates lessons from medical making to build fair, equitable, and sustainable infrastructure for collaboration between experts and non-experts. From these value-driven insights, I hope my work further contributes practical, methodological, and ethical implications for multiple stakeholders including policymakers and researchers.
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2021-12-13
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Dissertation