Negotiating Care Through Tangible Tools and Tangible Service Designing in Emergent Public Health Service Ecosystems

In shaping relations between service design and public health, one key challenge is how to meaningfully and systemically negotiate prospective services and long-term design-informed care support. In this chapter, we address this through a heuristic and exploratory ‘case’ centred in design-ethnographic and research through design qualitative inquiry by way of co-design with an inter-professional team in a non-dualist view of building care in PH. The focus is on the development and use of tangible tools in the early phase of service design to support processes of negotiation in this team concerned with building shared understanding and related strategies for allocating and connecting care in the context of establishing a new oncology ward at a leading Nordic hospital. The chapter assembled a transdisciplinary review of related research, drawing on developments in human–computer interaction on tangibility and tangible and embodied interaction. Tangible tools are three-dimensional, mediating artefacts designed to facilitate multimodal communication and interaction via situated actions afforded by an artefact’s designed physical attributes, representational and social semiotic properties. In discussion of transdisciplinary framings and actual use, we discuss the role of such tools in service design in PH and connect them to a wider approach to service ecosystems design, closing a positioning of the design-research in what we term ‘Tangible Service Design’.