Information Empathy at the Touchpoints of Care

Peter Jones Design for Care

A well-attended roomful of IAs, designers and strategists awaited us Saturday for the first World Information Architecture Day – I was in DC at Sapient’s Arlington auditorium, with Dan Brown (@brownarama) and great folks from the National Cancer Institute. Dan led off with a talk on collaborative design teams, based on his book Designing Together. I closed the day with a new talk based on care-centered information design guidelines in Design for Care.  One of the themes in the book is that information (content creation) must be developed as if it were a care practice. Caregivers and people in all health-seeking situations rely simple search access to internet and trusted institutional content – and because of the complexity of healthcare situations and the emotional concern of health, very little critical assessment may occur. The rapid-pace context of mobile interfaces compounds this issue. We cannot pretend to have solved it – …