A situated exploration of designing for personal health ecosystems through data-enabled design

This paper presents a design case study from industry that explores designing for personal health ecosystems. Following on from previous work on ecologies that gives a predominantly theoretical perspective, we present a more applied and design-oriented perspective. To do so, we build on our previously-developed data-enabled design approach, which utilizes contextual, behavioral and experiential data from situated design experiments as creative material. This approach comprises two steps, of which this paper presents the first (contextual) step. We introduced a small adaptable ecosystem of multiple artifacts, in four family homes over a period of eight weeks, through which we explored and further expanded on valuable ecosystem relationships. The insights gained were translated into three design opportunities that inform a future second step. We highlight and discuss practical examples from our situated explorations, and discuss how our data-enabled design approach served in designing for the complexity and versatility inherent to these ecosystems.