- Current projects
- Support4all
- The Power of Sheffield Journeys
- Photography in Care Homes
- Pain talking
- Non-invasive ventilation
- NIHR Knowledge Mobilisation Research Fellowship
- Insights into telehealth and care technologies (InTaCT)
- Home health monitoring: EyKos HealthHub
- Head Up
- Grip strength and dexterity
- Exhibition in a box
- engagingaging
- Better out-patient services for older people
- Development of design and production system for carbon fibre ankle foot orthoses
- Knowledge Mobilisation
- ‘State of the art’ of Design in Health
- War and Medicine
- Art, Simulation and Surgical Humanities
- Chlamydia testing awareness
- Mobile infusion pump
- Wearable medical monitoring
- Spinal Injury Design Workshops
- Promoting social change by design
- User-Centred Healthcare Design (UCHD)
- Packaging openability
- Where art meets technology
- Tactile map
- Shape of things to come
- Every-sense
- SMART rehabilitation
- Living rooms 1 and 2
- Future Bathroom
- Project archive
- Student projects
Latest news
- Lab4Living goes to Melbourne
- Lab4Living celebrate their ten year anniversary
- Thinking about design and mental well-being in Maltese Healthcare
- Lab4Living embark on new project in end of life care
- Living well with dementia in Scotland
- Lab4Living influencing the health curriculum in Zurich
- Kelham Island
- Exciting new collaboration between Lab4Living and China Academy of Arts
- Design and the Ageing Brain Symposium: Auckland, New Zealand
- Action Alliance: Designing a dementia friendly city
Spinal Injury Design Workshops
The team from Sheffield Hallam University was the Lab4Living team. We wanted to establish shared ownership of the project with the SCI participants from the Princess Royal unit. We made explicit the fact that this was a joint enquiry; an opportunity for shared learning and to break the stereotypical view of the designer’s role as the ‘expert’ drafted in to solve functional problems identified by the users.
The aims and objectives in the project were summarized as:
The project took the form of a series of 6 workshops that introduced the concept of design as a way of thinking interwoven with practical actions to resolve problems that anyone could face in everyday life. We specifically attempted to steer clear of specific challenges or issues that might be faced by the individual participants as we feared that this might potentially narrow down the focus of design. The workshops were losely based around the following themes:
1. What is design?
2. Prototyping; iterative trial and error
3. Design Encounters: ‘sensing’ the world differently
4. Mapping and Contextualising
5. Design Questions; asking the right question
6. Lateral thinking
The research team were hugely supported by by a team of students from the MDes and MA course run here at Sheffield Hallam University who committed their time to this project over and above the demands and requirements of their course. The feedback from all the students was overwhelming positive with references to the impact of this project on their own design practise and more widely on their lives.
This phase of the Design and Rehabilitation project concluded with a seminar hosted by the RSA, at which clinicians, designers and SCI patients from the three different teams from Glasgow, Sheffield and Buckinghamshire came together to share their experiences. A summary of this seminar can be found here and a report of phase two can be found here.