Wickedness in Design for People Diagnosed with Schizophrenia

With the digitisation of society, e-health technology increasingly supports new design situations that extend those traditional to Information Systems, and therefore need to be better understood. In design for complex, new and sensitive design situations, it is not possible to apply known methods and solutions without a deeper situational understanding. These design situations are fraught with wicked problems that are contradictory and complex. This paper intends to answer how the wickedness of the design situation when designing e-health technology for people diagnosed with schizophrenia can be understood and what consequences the design situation has for the design process. The paper presents a grounded theory analysis of stakeholder interviews and focus group interviews with people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Four wicked problems are identified: struggle of dependence, contradiction of social interaction, contradiction of trust and counteracting improvement behaviour. The problems are interrelated and have consequences for the design, acceptance, use and user involvement in design of e-health technology for people diagnosed with schizophrenia. The paper also shows the viability of using grounded theory for studying and describing situational wickedness