The In-Home Use of Medications: In Pursuit of Design-Driven Knowledge

Abstract

The importance that medications can have in people’s daily lives at home is self-evident, particularly in the case of chronic therapy. And yet, although medications are often part of daily routines, there is still a relative inertia from a design perspective of innovating medications as “objects” inhabiting the domestic landscape. Healthcare and medication innovations are driven by clinical requirements that deal with health issues, albeit often lacking extensive person-centered consideration. This paper aims to address some concerns about the use of medications at home, in order to convert them into design concerns. To this end, this study takes the form of a literature review that could be of interest to designers committed to forthcoming advancements in the field. Meant as a theoretical paper, it partly revisits and integrates consolidated studies conducted in the anthropology of pharmaceuticals, along with inputs derived from patient-related healthcare literature.

KEYWORDS: : :

• medications
• in-home healthcare
• person-centered design
• product affordance
• product design

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Medical anthropology articulates many currents. From a detailed summary inventory (Desclaux and Lévy 2003 [p. 6] in particular) we selected ethno-medicine, which deals with the sociocultural construction of disease and healing systems; socio-anthropology that deals with roles, differences, inequalities, and social uses built around disease; critical medical anthropology, which deals with biomedicine as a cultural production; and ethno-pharmacology, which studies the cultural construction of medicinal remedies, articulating it with the pharmacological analysis of the products used. The proposal for an anthropology of pharmaceuticals (van der Geest et al. 1996) is also grafted onto these currents.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Silvia Pizzocaro

Silvia Pizzocaro is full professor of industrial design at Politecnico di Milano, where she was the former chair of both the bachelor and of the master of science programs in Product Design at the School of Design. She holds a Master of Science in Architecture and a Ph.D. in Industrial Design. She is a current member of the board of professors of the Ph.D. program in design. Her research activity is embedded in the Department of Design, specifically in the section Design and Cultures. Over the years she has worked at the intersection of product design theory, design research culture, and doctoral education in design. Her study interests include design theory and research methods for product design. She has written and edited a number of books, including, Introduzione agli studi sull’utente [Introduction to User Studies: Getting to Know The Users between Research and Product Design] (2015) and Artefatti concreti [Tangible Artifacts: Basic Issues for Product Design] (2016). [email protected]

Antonella Penati

Antonella Penati is full professor of industrial design at Politecnico di Milano, where she was the former vice dean of the School of Design and chair of the bachelor program in product design. She holds a Master of Science in Architecture and a Ph.D. in Industrial Design. She is a current member of the board of professors of the Ph.D. program in design. Her study interests include product and sociocultural processes of innovation, design, and social narratives. As investigator of a research group based at the Department of Design, in 2019 she started an emergent area of studies on design and culture of care. She has written and edited a number of books, including, Mappe dell’innovazione [Maps of Innovation] (1999) and È il design una narrazione? [Is Design Narration?] (2013). [email protected]