Wellbeing+AI Design Hackathon

Reflecting at the end of 2023, I believe AI is the next big disruptive technology after the Internet. It will disrupt the value of goods and services exchanged, how we communicate, how we support others and the ability to live the life we want.

I find myself spending lots of time anticipating how human experiences will evolve, revolutionize how products and services are delivered, and reimagine organizational hierarchy and career disruption, faster and more furiously than the Internet did.

Towards a culture of Wellbeing

Our current consumer-based market keeps accelerating to unsustainable levels with detrimental effects partly due to outcomes based goals towards maximizing engagement for the purpose of maximizing ROI. We need to reframe ‘growth’ with ‘sustainable’ to regenerative systems, biomimicry.

Let’s figure out how NOT to deliver more half-baked digital solutions for people to use in the name of Agile, please? Let’s reframe how we talk about product delivery of what’s feasible to how we deliver products that are responsible for improving lives and meeting unmet needs, to amplify ethical behaviors.

As we design new solutions in the world, let’s refocus what individuals desire to what benefits people in communities and societies. That means STOP talking about engagement metrics and take the time to define beneficial metrics.

Make time for education and repurpose team meetings into experiential learning sessions to discuss ambiguous topics and dilemmas.

Design Innovation Workshops

To design a culture of wellbeing in the age of AI tools, we first need to up-skill our future health innovators with creative problem solving tools and build awareness of disruptive technologies, so that they may be able develop the foresight to predict unintended consequences.

In collaboration with Nursing Leaders at SONSIEL, Healthero has developed an experiential learning playbook to run Design Innovation Workshops (DIW) at health systems for leaders and frontline workers; and for nursing students in higher education.

This workshop format incorporates principles of design thinking, futures thinking, complexity theory and systems thinking to become better creative problem solvers. The simple activities introduce teams to new concepts and help teams develop shared language, learn new methods experientially and build critical thinking decision making skills with GenAI.

The activities create space to understand the impact of co-designing with AI tools, like chatGPT, while reducing the anxiety of emerging tech. The simple worksheet driven exercises build team driven decision making skills, forcing individuals to collaborate to empathize and problem solve. Learning from each other helps develop critical thinking skills while experimenting with what’s possible.

Here’s a case study of a Design Hackathon I ran at Boston College, Nov 2023. The topic: Diabetes Prevention for the Asian community.

Design Hackathon

First, team formation! I’m always amazed by what a team can accomplish over an individual in a short amount of time when given the space and the right tools to thrive. Teams also form much quicker when roles are defined around individuals strengths.

Each team member were asked to pick one role they would play during the event — the presenter, the contrarian, the maker, the connector, the empathizer and the facilitator.

The use of Wellbean characters I had created help depersonalize interactions while adding a bit of fun to increase creativity, which is especially effective when solving with deep-rooted health issues.

Framing Needs

Healthcare problems are system level, multi-disciplinary and social and therefore hard to frame as a single problem to solve. So we distributed teams to solve different ecosystem players that together would create a holistic ecosystem.

Teams were assigned Synthetic Personas generated by chatGPT as a way to infuse AI discussions into design activities. Teams were asked to evaluate accuracy and empathize with AI generated content to practice critical thinking skills.

During empathy mapping, and to gain deeper insight into population level unmet needs, teams dug deeper into the following system-level health factors:

• Psychosocial phenotypes
• Lifestyle Values & Beliefs
• Social determinants of health
• Decision Influencers
• Technology attitudes & Unintended consequences of prolonged use

To understand value drivers and incentive structures, teams then built out an ecosystem map.

Ecosystem mapping helped the team gain insight into factors that drive a system of behaviors and the market it creates. By visualizing interconnections & feedback loops, participants were introduced to systems thinking, by uncovering places to reimagine interventions, and personalize experiences.

Shaping Solutions

The second half of the workshop focused on imagining possible futures to create a Magazine Cover of the Future. The goal is to create energy and activate creativity to generate a shareable outcome that’s accessible and relatable.

Inspired by work at the Near Future’s Lab, teams were given design fiction cards categorized by Archetype (who), Artifact (what), Context (where) and Strategy (how). The content was customized for this challenge with the help of chatGPT.

To define solutions, the How might we activity was reframed to a game where teams were asked to draw random cards and reimagine new ideas by incorporating the cards drawn in quick succession.

Once the team felt they had enough ideas to converge, the converged on storytelling to produce the Magazine Cover of the Future. They had an hour and a half to generate and practice pitching the future of Diabetes Prevention for their persona.

Each pitch was 5–7 minutes long and the covers were judged on the diversity of ideas produced and how well the team worked together to generate those ideas.

What’s Next?

At SONSIEL’s THInC 2023 conference, Healthero introduced iPromptly. A simple web app to generate prompts for initiating a chatGPT dialog that would kickstart and augment idea generation. Given tremendous interest from nurse innovators to continue discussions, we’re developing more robust tools, for curious minds, to imagine how GenAI can impact the future of healthcare.

We see real value in pairing humans with GPT’s in pragmatic ways and creating space to diligently assess the impact of GenAI on the future of work. As people experience these workshops for the first time, we see development of personal agency and for a few, transformative change. We anticipate more demand for workshops in 2024, as leaders develop their AI strategies and kickoff change management initiatives and AI up-skilling training.

Amplify your innovation strategies with Design Innovation Workshops. Reach out to Healthero.io to learn how and plan your next event.

Reflect on your opportunity to redesign your life around a culture of wellbeing and establish a sustainable flow and resonance for people to flourish.