Spring 2011: Service Design


The study commenced with a workshop with the doctors in which their understanding of the patient journey was mapped on a wall. Already the reframing excercise created improvement needs based on new understanding as forced the participants to adopt the viewpoint of the patient instead basing it on their own work routines. Based on this work, the designers created a flowchart and refined it through interviews with the staff along the patient journey. This filled in gaps left by the initial workshop and lead to an early understanding of problems and opportunities throughout the patient journey.


Interviewing cancer patients presents a challenge for the actual interview situation. Due to the nature and emotional sensitivity of the condition, the interview settings had to be very carefully drafted. In many cases the treatment relationship between the patient and the hospital had continued for several years, which also presented a problem of remembering the different phases afterwards. With these constraints in mind, we decided to utilize the patient journey as a central element and games as a metaphor for discussing the treatment experience.

For the interviews, the journey was visualized as a gameboard and wooden pawns and chips were used as indicators of important events or people. This assisted the patients in remembering the events along the journey and allowed issues to come up that might be difficult to express in a normal interview. During the interviews we pointed to the board when talking about certain phases during the treatment. We also asked the patients to place the wooden pawns on the board to show which situations held positive or negative meanings for them and how those situations came about. The game board journey is more closely described in this separate section. After the interviews were analysed, key patients were invited into a workshop in which the early results were discussed and two initial concepts were refined. The service journey was shown as a large printout on a wall and concepts were worked on based on scenarios written as stories.





After the workshops the results were analysed and formed into three distinct deliverables:

Five design drivers guiding further development work

13 improvements situated on the patient journey

3 concepts for for future service and infrastructure design