Taking care of sensitive milieus: a story about dialogical interviews

Abstract

To be engaged in design processes in healthcare organizations often implies to deal with sensitive contexts, which, in turn, deal with a unique and delicate emotional setting. In this paper, we address reflections related to our research experience adopting dialogical interviews in sensitive design contexts. These reflections arise from a field work carried out within a network of nursing homes, within which we conducted 27 dialogical interviews with family members of patients in severe end-of-life conditions. With this contribution, we want to address the importance of taking care of the human relationships while working with sensitive participants, as a way to comprehend to which direction the design of a new technology should be driven.