Trial lecture - time and place
Place: Auditorium 3, Helga Engs hus
Time: 10:00 - 10:45
Title: When is it co-design? Relating objects, framing and expertise in professional practice
Public Defence
Place: Auditorium 3, Helga Engs hus
Time: 12:00 -
Adjudication committee
- 1st opponent: Professor David Guile, University College London
- 2nd opponent: Professor Johan Lundin, Department of Applied IT, div CLIC, University of Gothenburg
- Chair of committee: Professor Palmyre Pierroux, Department of Education, University of Oslo
Chair of defence
- Professor and Head of Department Anne Line Wittek, Department of Education, University of Oslo
Supervisors
- Principal supervisor: Professor and Head of Research Monika Bærøe Nerland, Department of Education, University of Oslo
- Co-supervisor: Professor II Åsa Mäkitalo, Department of Education, University of Oslo
Summary
While health professionals’ work is traditionally associated with care, digitalisation has increasingly involved professionals in technology design to ensure better integration of technology and work practices. In these settings, their tasks and responsibilities extend well beyond routine care work. Yet there is limited attention to what this actually entails for the professionals’ knowledge work and expertise.
This dissertation examines co‑design as knowledge work by focusing on health professionals co‑designing a patient information system for use in primary care. In the thesis, knowledge work is defined as the varied nature of professional action through which knowledge is generated, validated, and transformed when addressing complex tasks. The thesis is developed within the larger research project CORPUS, funded by the Research Council of Norway. Using an ethnographically inspired approach, the project followed the work of a design team in a major Norwegian city, consisting mainly of health professionals from different healthcare units, as well as a software engineer and a project leader. The primary data consist of recorded video observations from attended digital meetings over 1.5 years, during which a patient information system was designed with the goal of improving continuity of care across city districts and healthcare units. Supplementary data include documents and other material resources, as well as weekly recorded conversations with two team participants.
The following research questions guide the analysis: 1) how do the co‑design processes of patient information systems evolve? 2) what do design processes demand of health professionals? and 3) how can health professionals’ expertise in co‑design be conceptualised to account for these processes and demands? The empirical work is presented in three journal articles, which forms the basis for an integrated discussion in the thesis.
The thesis offers important insights into the demands placed on health professionals in co‑design settings, which extend beyond those of regular care work. The complexity of design settings entails professionals’ engagement in non‑routine problem‑solving, where challenges are rarely well defined. The thesis shows that professionals frame problems through their collective engagement with a range of established standards and knowledge from medical domains, such as medical standards, ideas of care, legal frameworks, and institutional and professional discourses. Two capacities stand out as important for knowledge work in co‑design: 1) epistemic reflexivity, the capacity to critically examine and reconfigure knowledge claims and their implications for professional action, and 2) system thinking, understood as the capacity to anticipate, align, and integrate specific work practices with wider workflows in healthcare. These capacities are important to understand in order to better support and facilitate professionals’ knowledge work when they face complex digitalisation challenges.