Research Area
Aging is a gradual shift of autonomy from physical control to relational connectedness. Service as a social system was developed to provide this connection to human network. Scholars from the fields of design, nursing, engineering, and health informatics are collaborating to develop services that support older adults’ autonomy and healthy longevity.
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Technology Literacy
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Emergency Evacuation
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Health Autonomy
Faculty Coordinator: Miso Kim
The Impact of Climate Change on Young Adults’ Mental Health
This research group is seeking to understand attitudes in young adults (18-24) regarding climate change and how it affects mental health and health behaviors. We hypothesize that the environmental risk wrought by climate change and the national conversation on sustainability likely leads to a spectrum of beliefs, behaviors, and values regarding personal agency and resilience, which we are loosely defining as climate nihilism, climate ambivalence, and climate hope. The working group is pursuing two phases of data collection using complementary, cross-disciplinary methods (i.e., Design Toolkits, Online Surveys) to explore collective and relational aspects of climate change and health.
Team Members: Miso Kim, Michael A. Mages, Sara Carr, Susan Mello, Estefania Ciliotta
Students: Madison Thomas and Yechan Yang
CAMD Center for Design Dean’s Fellows
Design For Empowered Patientship: Mapping the Boston Healthcare Ecosystem
This research team is mapping the healthcare ecosystems of Boston and Milan, exploring the co-design and co-production processes that contain evidence of patient-driven innovation. The project observes and maps different scenarios in which design plays a role in the interdisciplinary innovation process, mapping experiences and practices of products-services, technologies, organizational processes, initiatives, public programs or actions, and policies—with the goal of pinpointing and connecting this emergent knowledge to the actors’ system that produced them. The mapping of the Boston healthcare ecosystem will be compared with Milano’s to clarify the nature of the empowered patientship and identify opportunities for strategic cross-connections and research initiatives through interdisciplinary collaborations and partnerships. The project aims to promote a cure to care cultural, pragmatic, and interdisciplinary transition in healthcare systems; nurturing a patient-centric development of new products-services to provide more agency and choices to patients and promote health equity and inclusion (meaning impact on individual satisfaction and community welfare).
Team Members: Miso Kim, Michael A. Mages, Susan Mello, Estefania Ciliotta, Paolo Ciuccarelli,Stefano Maffei, Beatrice Villari, Massimo Bianchini