I have been quiet for an aweful long time - and a lot has happened since. Most importantly: my thesis is all done, approved and on the shelves of the Cambridge libary, so I am now a doctor (yeah). I since moved back to Germany and for the last 14 month I have been working as a consultant in Munich, with a focus on health care projects.
In case you are interested, I pasted the abstract of my thesis below. If you want to read the full thing, drop me a message (ideally with a bit of beackground on what you do and why you are interested in my work) and I can send you the pdf.
Applicability of Engineering Design Processes in
the Design of Integrated Intellectual Disabilities Services in England
This
dissertation investigates the applicability of engineering design processes for
the design of integrated intellectual disabilities (ID) services in England. It
aspires to contribute to the development of an engineering-design-style (ED)
design process for a particular integrated health and social care organisation.
Healthcare services in the developed world are faced with challenges arising
from a growing burden of chronic disease and aging populations. In order to
address these challenges, a more holistic understanding of health that also
considers social factors is needed. A local integrated care service for people
with intellectual disabilities constitutes an interesting case study as these intellectual
disabilities services have several decades of experience in integrating health-
and social care.
This
study contributes to knowledge by elicitating the need to combine the
engineering tradition of design as problem-solving with the tradition of design
as enquiry. The applicability of engineering design processes in an
indisputably complex domain, such as integrated ID services, also helps clarify
of the concept of complexity within engineering design. Methodological
contributions are made by developing and applying a research framework for
exploratory design research and by demonstrating the utility of engineering
design tools outside engineering. Furthermore, this study also provides
important insights for the healthcare management literature by suggesting an approach
to distinguishing complicateness from complexity, demonstrating the value of
contributions of currently marginalised stakeholders and showing the
applicability of a mathematical technique for pre-structuring service user
involvement.
The
research is guided by a framework developed specifically for exploratory design
research into the care service domain. An initial exploratory study
investigates design-related issues faced by the local service and to which
degree engineering design is applicable. The predominantly qualitative data is
analysed in diagrammatic form. It emerges that the formal, structural aspects
of the organisation are complicated and suited to an engineering design
approach. However, complex informal aspects, such as customs or personal
relationships, surround the formal structure and are beyond the current scope of
ED design processes but can be addressed by approaches in the design as enquiry
tradition. Four issues are identified which will require amendments to the ED
design process: organisational settings, knowledge management, the lack of a
clear role, and neglected stakeholders.
The
exploratory study is followed up by a detailed study which uses a Delphi
approach to investigate whether the confusion about the role of specialist
services is a general problem in the ID field. It further characterises key
stakeholder groups in ID services in terms of their expertise and level of
agreement or disagreement. The findings outline requirements for new design approaches
that bridge the traditions of design as enquiry and design as problem-solving.
