Combining Architectural and Social System Design Tools to Deepen the Dialogue Among Ecosystem Actors

This chapter describes the somewhat inadvertent nudging of a care ecosystem toward greater integration. It is a story of how an architect and a care delivery designer collaborated to engage multiple ecosystem actors in different conversations, to create a shared vision and design goals for a new neighborhood clinic to be situated in an existing residential low-income facility. The construction phase of the project was ultimately abandoned but the process of coming together to design the physical space and setting may have influenced and enhanced the overall development of a healthier, more resilient care ecosystem. The actors participating in this story included building residents, neighborhood residents, city and county program managers, the developer/owner, clinical staff for the proposed clinic, several architects (including the first author of this chapter), and a care delivery designer (second co-author of this chapter). These ecosystem actors might otherwise not have had the kind of conversations that were made possible by our cross-disciplinary DesignLab approach for multi-stakeholder engagement and collaborative designing. The DesignLab methodology used methods and tools from the fields of design thinking, appreciative inquiry, socio-technical systems and complexity science. The chapter describes what steps were taken, what methods were used, what was made possible, and what was learned that may be useful to others approaching similar design opportunities.