Empirical Sensibility in Design Workshops of Healthcare Infrastructures

Socio-technical infrastructures are essential for healthcare work, however when hospitals decide to replace their analog artefacts with digital ones, it changes the basic conditions of the work. We know little about the transformation process by which new technological opportunities are created and negotiated before being implemented in practice. In this paper, we focus on the work conducted during 22 design workshops, where healthcare professionals and designers collaborate to customize an EDIS system for a paediatric emergency department. When infrastructures are replaced, we risk dissolving critical connections and introducing complexities. Thus, we argue that bringing empirical sensibility into design workshops can help foresee the possible future risk of cutting connections.