Above the Line / Below the Line: Determining priorities for NOVELL Redesign Stage 2

Our stage 1 workshop series generated some incredible conversations, some fantastic insights, and some truly unique ideas. Since we wrapped up this series of workshops at the end of 2020 (see summary here), our team has been hard at work with analysing the contributions in each of these workshops, and using a thematic analysis process to translate these from contributions in a digital workshop environment, to actionable insights that we can use to inform design innovation.

One of the challenges in this process is choosing which elements to prioritise when “they are all important”. There are a number of different ways this can be done, but for NOVELL Redesign, we have enlisted the help of Professor Leonid Churilov to design and apply a Multi Criteria Decision Analysis process. This process has allowed us to use the expertise of our NOVELL Redesign Co-Researchers to collaboratively prioritise the opportunities for innovation that were identified during Stage 1 of the project. Critically, this process gives us a framework for people to conduct their evaluations that provides more rigour than simply asking “which ideas do you think are best?” and searching for consensus.

Our next task is to determine which ideas we take forward into the next stage of the project. As much as we would love to have the resources to investigate all of the challenges that we have identified, it is important to direct resources to providing potential solutions that can be developed with enough fidelity to allow the evaluation stage of the project to deliver high-quality evidence to inform future design practice. We have been referring to this process as “above the line / below the line” because rather than focusing on which of the ideas are good or not, we are looking at where we metaphorically “draw the line” on which of the challenges are already addressed in other areas of healthcare design or already included in guidelines (“below the line”) and which are new and innovative (“above the line”).

As part of this process, we assembled a series of mini-briefs that were tested in a workshop with industry partner Silver Thomas Hanley Healthcare Architects (you can read more about this in our previous blog post). We then asked our co-researcher group to help us prioritise these mini-briefs through a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis process. In this process, our co-researchers were asked to review each of the mini-briefs to determine how in need of innovation, attention and redesign they believed they were, then to consider them against each of the fundamental objectives of rehabilitation (efficiency, effectiveness, safety and wellbeing).

Image: Illustration of the Fundamental Objectives of rehabilitation design as defined by Lipson-Smith et al. (2019)

This structure allows us to investigate:

·      which ideas should be prioritised for redesign in the next stage of the project,

·      whether co-researchers from different backgrounds (i.e. stroke survivors, clinicians, architects and designers, and academics) see potential for innovation in different areas,

·      which of the fundamental objectives are prioritised by each group in their ‘overall’ ranking, and

·      which of the means objectives are highlighted as being most in need of attention through the process.