Rural Healthcare
Categories
Design Research
Team
Audrey Desjardins
Project
Rural Healthcare Relationships
Timeline
3 months
Year
2025
This project began broadly. We wanted to study healthcare as a system — care relationships, access, how technology reshapes provider interactions. As we moved through secondary research, a pattern emerged: rural communities were consistently framed in terms of lack, rarely from the perspective of the people living there. That tension led us here.
This project began broadly. We wanted to study healthcare as a system — care relationships, access, how technology reshapes provider interactions. As we moved through secondary research, a pattern emerged: rural communities were consistently framed in terms of lack, rarely from the perspective of the people living there. That tension led us here.
My teammates Macks and Kaitlyn brought personal connections to rural America. I brought distance — and a responsibility to listen carefully, question assumptions, and build shared language rather than project meaning onto participants' lives.
When our original research question stopped holding the complexity of what we were hearing, I led the reframe: instead of asking how technology could improve rural healthcare, we asked how different cultural realities shape how providers and communities understand and practice care. That shift let us stop chasing solutions and start understanding systems.
My teammates Macks and Kaitlyn brought personal connections to rural America. I brought distance — and a responsibility to listen carefully, question assumptions, and build shared language rather than project meaning onto participants' lives.
When our original research question stopped holding the complexity of what we were hearing, I led the reframe: instead of asking how technology could improve rural healthcare, we asked how different cultural realities shape how providers and communities understand and practice care. That shift let us stop chasing solutions and start understanding systems.
I led synthesis — translating transcripts, maps, and stories into definitions the team could design from: scarcity as a baseline condition, continuity as presence valued over efficiency, belonging as a prerequisite for trust. These became the scaffolding for our speculative work, which we treated as research probes rather than solutions, returning them to participants for critique.
I led synthesis — translating transcripts, maps, and stories into definitions the team could design from: scarcity as a baseline condition, continuity as presence valued over efficiency, belonging as a prerequisite for trust. These became the scaffolding for our speculative work, which we treated as research probes rather than solutions, returning them to participants for critique.
