alternative now The Stage Two project ‘NHS 24 Alternative Now’ brief was a live project with NHS 24. We were to explore how NHS 24 can expand upon its current offer, envisioning how their services may exist in the future. NHS 24 fit under the larger umbrella of the NHS, and as an organisation they focus providing telehealth and telecare services to the whole of Scotland. Currently they offer a number of different digital touch points, however at the moment they are somewhat limited. NHS 24 want to expand upon their current service offering and also envisions widening the organisations remit. Within this, we have been challenged with exploring people’s behaviours and interactions around NHS 24.
This in turn will allow us to gain a deeper understanding of people’s lives and in turn create a framework to address current needs and speculate new, innovative and alternative ways of living. We were to explore and question what additional features, needs and services could NHS 24 offer. As part of this brief we were assigned the sub-topic of ‘robots.’ With robots being utilised in other industries, we were to explore how robots could be used to mediate our relationship with NHS 24 by introducing new ways of thinking about remote access to healthcare. We can explore how they could be a point of access through physical and digital interactions in response to emerging health needs. This meant understanding if their existing offering could be rethought to provide a different offering, which would be more meaningful for individuals or groups. Therefore, our project looked at what we might do differently today that may reframe possibilities. We explored how alternative scenarios may exist and we designed in response to these. We did not aim to design futures, but to think about how existing and emerging technologies can be used to connect innovative personal/social behaviours and interactions. Through these innovations, NHS 24 aims to improve the NHS 24 health and care system as a whole.
4