Proceedings of Designing Self-care for Everyday Life. Workshop in conjunction with NordiCHI 2014, 27th October.

Abstract

Managing chronic conditions can be challenging. People in such conditions, and the people around them, have to, for example: deal with symptoms, adapt to the resulting disability, manage emotions, and change habits to keep the condition under control. Self-care technologies have the potential to support self-care, however they often disregard the complexity of the settings in which they are used and fail to become integrated in everyday life.

The present collection of papers forms the Proceedings of the Workshop “Designing Selfcare for Everyday Life” conducted last October 27th, 2014 in Helsinki, where 14 participants from 7 different countries spent the day discussing how to design self-care technologies that are in harmony with people’s everyday life. During the morning, discussions were driven by poster presentations focused on the participants’ work. In the afternoon, we engaged in a
participatory design exercise focused on the self-care of Parkinson’s disease. Our discussions were driven by the experience of two people living with Parkinson’s that participated in our workshop. At the end of the exercise, each group presented the different insights, concepts and problems that each patient experiences in their everyday life with the disease. Last, we all engaged in a broader discussion with a mapping exercise of issues and challenges in relation to self-care.

The contributions featured in the proceedings have been peer-reviewed by the members of the Workshop Program Committee and selected on the basis of their quality, alignment with the workshop theme, and the extent (and diversity) of their backgrounds in design. They express points of view of researchers from both Academia and Industry and provide relevant insights in the design and development use of technologies for self-care.

We want to thank all the participants and co-authors for contributing to the Workshop. We are particularly grateful to the two patients, members of the Finnish Parkinson’s Association, who accepted to participate in the workshop and enabled researchers to get a
perspective on the challenges of their lives. We also want to thank all the Programme Committee members for all their work during the reviewing process as well as the organisers of NordiCHI 2014 for providing useful facilities.