Emotional Design and the Healthcare Environment

For all of the tremendous advances in medicine and treatment the world has seen in the modern era, the human body’s ability to heal itself remains a (literally) vital and often overlooked facet of healthcare. Through the use of emotional design, aimed at transforming healthcare environments, such as waiting rooms, in such a way as to boost the emotional wellbeing of patients, and thus their general attitudes, including in regard to their own healing processes, medical institutions can improve outcomes for the people they treat while simultaneously lowering overall costs. Design, as an inherently transdisciplinary, problem-solving activity, is well-suited to this task. And when combined with a field of study such as neuroscience, which can literally map out the perceptions that lead to the experience of particular emotions, healthcare environments can be transformed into spaces (through such innovations as Kansei engineering) that then subsequently transform the people who rely on them the most, leading to more efficiency and less red ink.

About the Author

Marco Maiocchi graduated in 1969 with a degree in Physics. He served as assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of Milan beginning in 1973, and then as a full professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Faculty of Design. Retiring in 2013, he has continued teaching, up to and including the present day, at Politecnico di Milano, Design Faculty, and is a lecturer at the Conservatorio di Milano. After twenty years of research in Programming Methodologies, Software Quality and Engineering, he moved the focus of his research toward the Internet, Multimedia Communication, Neurosciences in Communication and Emotional Design. Among the founders of Etnoteam in 1978, he was also CEO of I.NET until 2004. He has been responsible for many software projects, including Government Researches. He has been an active presence in many cultural and artistically avant-garde circles, as well as being the author of many books and hundreds of scientific and popularized papers.

Dr. Zhabiz Shafieyoun is currently an adjunct professor at Winthrop University. She was a research scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2015-2019.  She earned a Ph.D. in Design with a concentration in Design Research from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 2016. Both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees are in Industrial Design from the Art University of Tabriz. Additionally, she has 10 years of industry experience working for five major Iranian companies as a designer, researcher and creative director, work she has executed in three different countries. Her doctoral work explored a variety of topics, including emotional design, service design, and healthcare design. Using the Japanese method of Kansei Engineering, she studied emotional design in healthcare centers, focusing on ideas for increasing positive emotions and designing a new method for determining the emotional impact of waiting areas. She co-founded the European Kansei Engineering Group in 2014.