Company: J5 Design

Client: Calgary Foothills Primary Care Network

Country: Canada

A Primary Care Network (PCN) needed to consolidate multiple clinics and providers into a single physical space. The project required collaboration between four key parties: the PCN
leader, an interior design company, healthcare providers, and a service design company.

The objective was to design a clinic that meets the needs of its users through an innovative and collaborative process bringing together the best approaches from each profession.

Our service design company reframed our role from designer to translator. We aimed to create a better healthcare experience by creating new channels for providers, patients, and other professions to design for impact. The project progressed through four phases:

1. Pre-Design: Distributing playful self-directed tools focused on building empathy and trust between the design team participants. Deepening a shared understanding of staff, patients and providers current experiences. Designing the experience of working together.
2. Design Principles: Hosting workshops with clinicians and staff in which we established a shared language through principles, proto-personas, and using that language to name vivid design opportunities everyone understands.
3. Wind Tunneling: Holding safer space in workshops with over 100 participants to surface the worries, emotions, and insights that matter most and testing the designs against them through scenarios and user prototypes.
4. Big Moves: Reimagining the design review process and helping the client evaluate their choices. Developing nine "Big Moves” as key recommendations, each involving trade-offs, to guide the final design, validated through additional workshops. Packaging that direction effectively in order to provide inspiring direction to the interior designers and support change management for the PCN as it transforms.

The project demonstrated the value of service design as a translator between disciplines for complex projects in fields like healthcare. Our collaboration allowed the interior design team to meet tight deadlines and deliver a functional, exceptional healthcare space. It also provided the PCN leadership with insights to improve change management and workflow processes.

We think this story matters because it describes a critical reframe for the field of service design: moving from designer to translator. This project highlighted how service design and multi-disciplinary collaboration can drive sustainable, impactful outcomes. By focusing on the process of working together, and practical and future-forward design, together we created a clinic that supports better health outcomes and fosters a collaborative environment.

“Moving to a new building means moving to a new mentality. We have to be open to change.”