As the NHS pushes national policy and future development strategies towards a greater focus on self-management and illness prevention, the core aim of this research is to develop and test design interventions that can inform learning and provoke positive health behaviour change.

Now in the early stages of development and mapping, the research will investigate how experiential healthcare learning can be integrated into daily ‘analogue’ activities and artefacts to create greater resilience, minimise more costly and serious health issues later in life and encourage greater responsibility and self-efficacy. This references the NHS Long Term Plan of 2019 to give people more control over their own health by doing things differently, preventing illness and tackling health inequalities.

Under the working title of ‘Objects of Healing; nudging behaviour to inform and provoke health self-management’ there are two associated key questions that seek to be answered. Firstly, how can design create pre-emptive healthcare interventions through everyday objects and experiential learning to provoke greater knowledge and responsibility for long term health. Secondly to ask what models, languages and affordances can be revealed that connect behaviour to benefit and create design principles for effective future healthcare communications.

In order to answer these questions a methodology of mixed methods will be employed; utilising approaches that initially include participatory design research, critical design, action research, questionnaires and selected service design research methods. Theoretical perspectives aligned to design, behavioural and social sciences will be used, potentially including Com B, Nudge, social cognitive theory, anthropology, Latour’s Actor Network Theory, Object Orientated Ontology, hermeneutics, speculative and discursive thinking.

Artefacts will be created to test a variety of activities and scenarios in one’s daily routine that will provoke the user to consider different health themes and issues. These will act as a catalyst to aid the healing, diagnosis, care, testing or the positive encouragement of an individual’s health and lifestyle situation. Measuring the potential impact of this learning and the design approach taken will be critical to the project. Of particular interest will also be revealing the latent traits, affordances and impact of the artefacts as to the effectiveness of the communications. In conjunction with this, approaches to storytelling through information delivery will also be investigated and how emotion, humour, play, performance, simplicity and more poetic strategies can create impact on learning uptake.